I stumbled across two great articles regarding mentoring over the past few months and thought I would share them with you.
Bloomberg Business Week magazine had a great article on mentoring and the millennial generation (born 1977 to 1997) back in March 2013. The author discusses several issues regarding how to develop mentoring program for this particular generation as they are not like the X (born 1965-1976) and Baby Boomer (born 1946-1964) generations that preceded them. Of note the article points out that Millennials prefer to have a team of mentors to tap into. Is this a result of their ability to use social media to expand their networks and be comfortable with inputs from many? Also, the article mentions that many companies/organizations are using peer to peer and reverse mentoring to better serve Millennials.
Earlier this summer, Pete Van Mullem published an article in PE Links4U on finding a mentor from a coach’s perspective.
Van Mullem acknowledges that finding a mentor can be challenging, but advocates the following three methods to increase the opportunity for a mentor/mentee relationship to occur;
- actively seek guidance
- develop the mindset of a mentee
- seek positions under servant leaders.
Ah, a mention of servant leaders. Topic for another blog later this fall!
But the key point here is that “actively seek guidance” means you basically need to ask for help. Personally, as well as many of you know, that can be a difficult thing to do. It takes humility to ask for help. But I have found that most people respond to it and you can gain so much from the mentoring relationship.
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2 comments
robert shannon
November 7, 2013 at 3:18 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
The British have explored this topic to a much greater detail than have we since many of their sport specific organizations assign a mentor to new level one certificate holders. The site sportcoachuk.org has reference resources already published and on that site under “resources” two studies of interest:
Coach Learning and Development:A review of the literature
In the search box enter “review” to get there the fastest (read the executive summary first as it is digestible vs the whole 104 page report)
Coaches Tracking Study ( a 4 year follow up of the resources
coaches found they used in their development and in primarily table form)
In addition there are several sections with info on mentoring in the recently published “Accelerated Expertise” by Hoffman et al ,that builds on the work by K. Anders Ericsson and his group over the last 20 plus years on developing expertise.
Suffice to say that all refer to the paucity of research on mentoring with the issues being 1) how to be effective in changing coaches behavior at the mentor /mentee relationship , 2) best mentor styles and behavior
All seem to feel that the best research would reinforce “deliberate practice ” concepts of constantly pushing the mentee edges on their assumptions and analyses as well as problem solutions, has the best, though still too limited, data support.
Jodi Murphy
September 9, 2013 at 11:53 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
So many coaches feel like they need to know it all right out of the gate, but no one knows it all when they start! Don’t be afraid to ask for advice and guidance and tips–that’s one the only ways to get better at what you.