It would be easy to conclude, from the vast numbers of research papers and studies on mentoring, that the field is pretty well covered. In practice, that’s far from the truth. It’s noticeable, for example, that there are far more quantitative studies than qualitative. (The opposite is the case for the parallel field of coaching.)...
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Mentoring as been around, in one form or another, for 2,500 years or more. Coaching, the new kid on the block, has a history of at most a couple of hundred years. Yet, while mentoring in the past three decades has had great impact on social development, it is coaching that has captured the headlines (more…)
On a recent visit to Taiwan, I was introduced to the thinking of the Chinese philosopher, Wang Yang-Ming(1472-1529). One of the elements that I particularly liked was that he placed equal emphasis on tranquility and activity, on thinking and doing. He believed that knowledge is incomplete until it becomes conduct, and conduct is not complete...
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One of the remarkable aspects of mentoring is how extensively researched the topic has been. However, extensively-researched isn’t the same as well-researched. Having had to trawl through hundreds of papers and a fair pile of dissertations for my own current doctoral research, I soon came to echo the thoughts of an anonymous business school faculty...
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Ethical mentoring is a fairly new term, but it’s likely to be one we are going to hear a lot more of. The concept comes from a recognition that unethical and illegal behaviour in organizations rarely happens because an individual or group of people set out to do wrong. Rather, it starts with small breaches (more…)
When a successful female entrepreneur is held up as a role model, is it a good thing or not? There is now so much evidence that women can be as effective (and in some circumstances, such as rural economies in developing countries, considerably more successful in business creation) than men, that the fact we still...
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One of the exercises I frequently conduct with audiences is to ask them to define what they mean by success. It’s something few have thought about. Almost invariably, the responses fall into two categories: It’s evident that the first of these is largely externally driven and about recognition by others, while the second is more...
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The ability of humans to collaborate in teams on large-scale projects goes back thousands of years, according to theories emerging from the evidence of excavations of ancient monuments. Ancient monuments like Stone Henge, the Egyptian Pyramids, the statues of Easter Island and the 3,500-year-old Poverty Point in Louisiana are often depicted as the result of (more…)
In all the major models of human maturity, two qualities recur constantly: wisdom and connectedness. Wisdom, as exemplified by the original mentor, Athene, relates to the process of reflection upon and learning from experience. The scope of wisdom is therefore associated with and to some extent limited by the range of experiences, to which a...
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If coaches and mentors rarely, if ever, offer advice, what do they do? They offer context. Context is “relevant information, which the learner does not hold, but which may have a significant effect upon the quality of the decisions they take”. Context might include: The diagram below shows two core contexts that encompass the coaching...
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