1
NONE OF US IS AS SMART AS ALL OF US THE ROLE
OF MENTORING IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF
ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP
Bill Fiala, PhD Azusa Pacific University Reina Juarez, PhD UC San Diego
Don Graham, EdD Cal State, Chico Sheri Richards, MS, MFT Saint Marys College
OCCDHE Spring Conference April 29, 2006
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Introduction

• Make your friends your teachers and mingle
  the pleasures of conversation with the advantages
  of instruction.
• (Gracián, as quoted in Peddy, 1998)

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Organizational Membership

• Interaction with colleagues is a vital
  component of professional development.
  Professional organizations offer an excellent
  opportunity for emerging psychologists to
  associate with other psychologists and to develop
  their own professional identity. Through that
  interaction, graduate students and early-career
  psychologists gain access to content experts and
  potential mentors while developing a sense of
  belonging within their discipline.
• (Dodgen, Fowler, Williams-Nickelson, 2003)

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Organizational Membership

• Why OCCDHE? Tell us about your first experience,
  what made you decide to become a member, what
  keeps you coming back

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Definitions and Experiences

• Mentoring is a personal relationship in which
  a more experienced professional acts as a guide,
  role model, teacher, and sponsor of a less
  experienced or junior professional. A mentor
  provides the protégé with knowledge, advice,
  challenge, counsel, and support in the protégés
  pursuit of becoming a full member of a particular
  profession.
• (Johnson, 2002)

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Definitions and Experiences

• Mentoring Functions (Kram,1988)
• Career functions Those aspects of the
  relationship that enhance learning the ropes and
  preparing for advancement in an organization
  (e.g., sponsorship, exposure and visibility,
  coaching, protection, provision of challenging
  assignments).
• Psychosocial functions Those aspects of the
  relationship that enhance a sense of competence,
  clarity of identity, and effectiveness in a
  professional role (e.g., role modeling,
  acceptance and confirmation, counseling,
  friendship).

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Definitions and Experiences

• Mentees are likely to have many mentors over
  the course of a lifetime, based on their
  individual needs at a specific point in time.
• (Zachary, 2000)

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Definitions and Experiences

• What has been your experience of being mentored
  in this organization? What about this
  relationship(s) was important to you? How does
  this compare or contrast with your experiences
  elsewhere?

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Characteristics Of Ideal Mentors

• Johnson, 2002
• intelligent
• caring
• appropriately humorous
• flexible
• empathic
• patient
• supportive
• encouraging
• poised
• emotionally intelligent
• ethical
• kind
• healthy
• competent

• Johnson Ridley, 2004
• exude warmth
• listen actively
• show unconditional regard
• embrace humor
• aware of interpersonal cues
• sensitivity to differences
• respectful of values
• trustworthy
• have integrity
• engage in self-care
• practice humility
• competent
• manage jealousy
• tolerate idealization

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Mentoring Experience

• Mentoring plays a very important role in
  leadership pleasure comes from seeing people one
  has mentored grow, blossom, and fulfill their
  potential. To be satisfied with the knowledge
  that one has played a part in making it happen, I
  think, takes maturity, integrity, the wisdom of
  experience, and the valuing of both the goals and
  the people who are working toward themI have
  always made it a point, if at all possible, never
  to be too busy to mentor a student or colleague,
  because unless we psychologists give a hand up to
  those who come behind us, we do not increase our
  ranks, we do not nurture talent, we do not
  prepare for the futureTo me, mentoring is an
  intrinsic part of life. I truly feel that
  psychologists have an obligation to help each
  other, and that in the process, we gain,
  ourselves.
• (Canter, 2000)

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Mentoring Experience

• Mentors are also likely to benefit
  substantially from mentoring. Mentors describe
  reaping extrinsic rewards, such as accelerated
  research productivity, greater networking, and
  enhanced professional recognition, when protégés
  perform well. Important intrinsic benefits
  include enhanced career satisfaction,
  rejuvenation of creative energy from
  collaboration with protégés, and a sense of
  generativity.
• (Johnson, 2002)

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Mentoring Experience

• Todays mentor is a facilitative partner in
  an evolving learning relationshiptodays mentor
  enjoys the benefits of rich learning
  opportunities that mentoring provides for mentors
  as well as mentees. A mentors own growth and
  development are nurtured through reflection,
  renewal, and regeneration.
• (Zachary, 2000)

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Mentoring Experience

• Has OCCDHE given you the opportunity to mentor
  others? Have you pursued this? If not, why not?
  If so, how has this experience(s) been for you?

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Future Directions

• In general, informal mentorships (those that
  develop spontaneously, without formal assignment
  by a third party) are evaluated by both mentors
  and protégés as being more effective and
  meaningful than formal (assigned) mentorships.
  Protégés in informal relationships receive more
  career and psychosocial function from mentors and
  report greater effect from, and satisfaction
  with, the mentorship. It appears that formally
  assigned mentorships result in less
  identification, less relational comfort, less
  motivation for mentoring, and ultimately less
  communication and interaction. Most agree that
  mentorshipsshould be facilitated rather than
  assigned.
• (Johnson, 2002)

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Future Directions

• I have thought about the many instances of
  very successful mentoring of which I have been
  aware over the years, and I think that most of
  them were the result of informal rather than
  formal mentoring relationships. It occurs to me
  that perhaps our energies might most productively
  be put into trying to arrange situations in which
  people can come together to talk or to work but,
  most importantly, to share something of
  themselves. The spontaneous relationships that
  spring up and result in mentoring in those
  instances appear to me to be among the most
  successful, perhaps because they allow for some
  mutual selection in terms of compatibilityI am
  not suggesting that formal programs be abandoned,
  just that they be supplemented. It is important
  to keep remembering what it was like to be new
  and to reach out a friendly hand.
• (Canter, 2000)

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Future Directions

• What are your suggestions for future directions
  for OCCDHE? Do you like what we do already? Can
  we make improvements? Are there other models or
  organizations you are aware of that we can learn
  from?

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Discussion

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Trivia Word History

• The word mentor is an example of the way in
  which the great works of literature live on
  without our knowing it. The word has recently
  gained currency in the professional world, where
  it is thought to be a good idea to have a mentor,
  a wise and trusted counselor, guiding one's
  career, preferably in the upper reaches of the
  organization. We owe this word to the more heroic
  age of Homer, in whose Odyssey Mentor is the
  trusted friend of Odysseus left in charge of the
  household during Odysseus's absence. More
  important for our usage of the word mentor,
  Athena disguised as Mentor guides Odysseus's son
  Telemachus in his search for his father. Fénelon
  in his romance Télémaque (1699) emphasized Mentor
  as a character, and so it was that in French
  (1749) and English (1750) mentor, going back
  through Latin to a Greek name, became a common
  noun meaning wise counselor, first recorded in
  1750. Mentor is an appropriate name for such a
  person because it probably meant adviser in
  Greek and comes from the Indo-European root men-,
  meaning to think.
• (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English
  Language, 1992)

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Selected References

• Bogat, G. A., Redner, R. L. (1985). How
  mentoring affects the professional development of
  women in psychology. Professional Psychology
  Research and Practice, 16, 851-859.
• Canter, M. (2000). Reflections on receiving an
  award. American Psychologist, 55, 1304-1311.
• Clark, R. A., Harden, S. L., Johnson, W. B.
  (2000). Mentor relationships in clinical
  psychology doctoral training Results of a
  national survey. Teaching of Psychology, 27,
  262-268.
• Dodgen, D., Fowler, R. D., Williams-Nickelson,
  C. (2003). Getting involved in professional
  organizations A gateway to career advancement.
  In Prinstein, M. J., Patterson, M. (eds.). The
  portable mentor Expert guide to a successful
  career in psychology. New York Springer
  Publishing.
• Gilbert, L. A., Rossman, K. M. (1992). Gender
  and the mentoring process for women Implications
  for professional development. Professional
  Psychology Research and Practice, 23, 233-238.
• Johnson, W. B., Ridley, C. R. (2004). The
  elements of mentoring. New York Palgrave
  Macmillan.
• Johnson, W. B. (2002). The intentional mentor
  Strategies and guidelines for the practice of
  mentoring. Professional Psychology Research and
  Practice, 33, 88-96.
• Kram, K. E. (1988). Mentoring at work
  Developmental relationships in organizational
  life. Lanham, MD University Press of America.
• Peddy, S. (2001). The art of mentoring Lead,
  follow and get out of the way. Corpus Christi,
  TX Bullion Books.
• Zachary, L. J. (2000). The mentors guide
  Facilitating effective learning relationships.
  San Francisco Jossey-Bass.