The authors discuss how to approach mentoring in order to develop people and build firms with strong mentoring cultures.
Mentoring has increasingly been recognized as a critical ingredient of success in many endeavors. In many instances, however, mentoring tends to be depicted as a relationship where a senior leader takes a junior professional under their wing and imparts the “formula” for success. Thus, mentoring programs focus on pairing junior employees with a single designated mentor.
In this article, Yesim Richardson and Lisa Claussen-Adams discuss how an organization can use its mentoring resources more effectively, for both developing people and building a strong mentoring culture, by investing in building and maintaining a more expansive view of mentoring that is focused on cultivating a network of mentors who play different roles based on their natural strengths and expanding its view of who can be a mentor.
Based on Cornerstone Research’s mentor surveys and interviews, the authors focus on the behaviors that are involved in effective mentoring—feedback, opportunity creation, connections and counsel, and role modeling—and provide specific recommendations for both mentors and mentees.
This article was originally published by Corporate Counsel Business Journal in June 2020.
The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of Cornerstone Research.
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