SEMANTICS vs. IMPACT

Maybe it is because I have always identified myself more as a pragmatist than an intellectual blowhard, but I find it quite amusing how many people out there continue to get caught up in semantically-based arguments around what exactly mentoring is and what it is not.  I recently read a great blog entry on Harvard Business Review's website (http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2011/02/demystifying-mentoring.html).  In my humble opinion, the author, Amy Gallo, did a succinct and very nice job grasping the needs of today’s workforce and helping to set an evolving mindset around how mentoring needs to work today in light of employees’ needs.  As suggested in her title, “Demystifying Mentoring,” she set out to dispel some myths about mentoring.  Great entry.

Then, I got to reading some of the comments and was greatly discouraged to see that some people out there continue to espouse the idea that mentoring can only be some type of long-term relationship and that practices such as situational mentoring and “on-demand” mentoring are somehow inappropriate.  Really?  We are still going to do this?  We are going to spend time arguing about the exact definition of what mentoring is when instead we could be focusing on how to have a positive impact on today’s workforce? 

This is a workforce that, by the way, has much more diverse learning needs than the workforce of even only 10 years ago.  The pace of change demands that organizations enable processes that promote speed to competency.  Don’t get me wrong, the traditional type of mentoring (long-term, one-to-one, senior-to-junior) relationships still offer value.  The issue is that when the entire process of mentoring is only defined as one in the same with that type of relationship, organizations are significantly limiting the impact that the process can have.

Mentoring at its core is about relationships.  More specifically, it is about intentional learning relationships involving two or more people, where those who are doing the learning are doing so from one or more people who have the knowledge, expertise, and experience to help the learner(s). These relationships can be shallow or deep, long or short, between two people or many, as well as senior-to-junior, junior-to-senior, and peer-to-peer.  At the end of the day, it is about the sharing of tacit knowledge between people.  To suggest that mentoring can only take place in long-term engagements is an antiquated view of the process.

For the record, we are not the only ones saying this.  If you have not already done so, I encourage you to see what the market is suggesting about what mentoring is, how it is changing, and how it needs to continue to change to meet the needs of today’s workforce:

• This past year, Forrester defined the evolving Business Mentoring market with their research piece: http://www.3creek.com/research/Forrester_Business_Mentoring_Aug10.pdf.
• Futurist David Houle talks about how learning needs to change in his Shift Age report:http://www.3creek.com/index.php?/Resources/shift-age-trend-report.html. 
• In 2008, Kathy Kram and Monica Higgins, in a MIT Sloan Management Review article advocated for the creation of mentoring networks (as opposed to the one, sage guru approach).  They posit, “How can one teacher know enough to help you keep up with rapidly changing technology, as well as navigate the challenges of globalization, a multicultural workforce and team-based decision making?”:  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/executive-adviser/2008-4/50410/a-new-approach-to-mentoring/
• Even back in a 2005 ASTD article, authors Allison Rossett and Gerald Marino were talking about the new ways that individuals and organizations were leveraging coaching and mentoring processes and not being tied to constrained definitions from the past:http://www.3creek.com/research/eCoaching_ASTD_Nov05.pdf