Strategies for Mentoring: A Blueprint for Successful Organizational Development

Citation

Mumford, A. (1999), "Strategies for Mentoring: A Blueprint for Successful Organizational Development", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 31 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.1999.03731gad.001

Strategies for Mentoring: A Blueprint for Successful Organizational Development

Strategies for Mentoring: A Blueprint for Successful Organizational Development

Christopher ConwayWileyNew York, NY1998208 pp.ISBN 0-471-98438-8 (Hardback)£24.95

Keywords Mentoring, National cultures, Case studies

The title of this useful book is perhaps misleading. It might more appropriately have been called "Effective practices in mentoring". It contains some excellent, though sometimes controversial, statements that would aid in the implementation of mentoring. It does not really provide alternative strategies. The author quite rightly says that there is a range of different benefits and uses for mentoring. So one might have expected from the title that there would be different explicit strategies related to these different benefits, but this is not provided.

So we have a book which is not significantly different in its coverage, although in some respects different in content, from UK authors such as Clutterbuck and Parsloe (neither of whom, sadly, are mentioned in the author's reading list).

The author starts with a broad view of different needs or objectives for mentoring. It is essentially a private relationship and one that is about development. One of the issues is the nature of the balance or imbalance between personal development and performance improvement to assist the organization. Conway rightly emphasizes in several places that mentoring ought to be part of a management development process offered through a variety of methods, rather than being a single process carrying the full weight of intended management development achievement. He describes the processes for implementing mentoring, including some important statements about managing the expectations of all parties involved. Here he emphasizes the necessity of bringing in the direct manager of people he calls mentorees to the explanation of the purposes and practices of the mentoring schemes. He has a good section on challenges to the mentor and a handy checklist for implementation. He emphasizes the need for formal training before introducing such a scheme and mentions, though perhaps too briefly, the significance of networks in maintaining it.

There is an excellent and very substantial chapter on cultural differences. Here I believe Conway to be very different in the depth of what he provides from other authors on mentoring I have read. I would recommend that anyone whose organization has a multinational dimension should read this chapter, which makes effective use of the ideas of Hofstede and Trompenaars.

The strengths of the book, apart from the previously mentioned chapter, are in the excellent case material and practical suggestions for implementing mentoring. The weaknesses seem to be the absence (except in the culture chapter) of frameworks, concepts, indeed even theories. There is, for example, no significant mention of the learning process involved, not even the usual nod of the head to Kolb or Honey and Mumford. Indeed, the author says that it is "possible to use learning styles or psychometric profiles. However this seems unnecessarily complex and time consuming." This fits in which his sometimes expressed aversion to carefully structured selection processes for establishing who should mentor with mentees. Apart from the issue of learning styles, I would personally challenge his preference for what he describes as "gut feeling" in matching. There is, however, some later confusion in terms of how far he would actually go in establishing some structured selection. Although he has a chapter specifically on building diversity, by which he means mentoring for women and minority groups, I did not find this of great depth.

Alan Mumford