Mentoring in Action: a Practical Guide (2nd ed.)

Citation

Megginson, D. (2006), "Mentoring in Action: a Practical Guide (2nd ed.)", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 14 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2006.04414gae.002

Mentoring in Action: a Practical Guide (2nd ed.)

Mentoring in Action: a Practical Guide (2nd ed.)

David Megginson, David Clutterbuck, Bob Garvey, Paul Stokes, Ruth Garrett-HarrisKogan Page, 2006

This book is designed to help people wanting to get into mentoring to understand what it looks and feels like in practice. It will help the reader to understand the range and scope of mentoring – the current state of the art. It answers the “what’s it about, and how is it done?” questions with a set of 27 case studies written by a number of mentors, their subjects, and organizers of mentoring schemes. This second edition, ten years after the first, brings the topic up to date, capturing the advances in thinking and practice in the last decade.

Part 1, “The mentoring framework”, outlines the process, best practice, how to set up a successful mentoring scheme, and how to have successful mentoring “episodes”. This is brief and to the point, with compact sections on key themes and issues. It starts with “definitions”, and ends with “ethics”.

Part 2, the bulk of the book, is a selection of 18 organizational case studies, which illustrate various approaches to mentoring as undertaken in a number of types of organization, public and private, large and small. Most of the examples are from the UK, but there are also case studies from France, Denmark, South Africa, Australia and Switzerland. Cases 1 to 9 are examples of mentoring in the public service, and range from schemes for young offenders, learning mentors, health workers, to schemes for junior academics, gender stereotyping in training. Each case picks up on themes emerging from that particular approach to mentoring, building up the body of knowledge in a way that avoids too much repetition. Each is written by a different author, and each is different in scope and style, which adds to the variety. Reading all 18 case studies at one sitting is probably only for the devoted student of mentoring schemes. This is a book to dip into. Collectors of four-letter acronyms will be pleased to learn that COCO is “coaching for confidence” and that GOOT is “grown your own timber”. Those interested in metaphors for leadership style will like case study 7, called “Plumbers, poets and learning”.

Case studies 10-18 are examples of mentoring in the private sector, in large organizations and small businesses, and include topics such as diversity mentoring, executive mentoring, and women and leadership.

Part 3 is a collection of nine individual case studies. Some are written from the perspective of the mentor, some from the experience of the subject, and some from the organizer’s perspective (for example, how approaches to mentoring work with different individuals). They offer stories, commentaries and reflective accounts. Some are by the authors, others are by people the authors have mentored. Case study 6 poses the question, “Is community mentoring pink and fluffy?” I shall not ruin the book for you by revealing the answer here. This second set of case studies will be of especial relevance for readers who are interested to see how mentoring relationships develop, and what they achieve. Several also mention how and why the relationship stopped and what happened next.

Part 4 is called “What we know now”, and pulls together themes emerging from the case studies. There are seven issues dealt with. One is “the need for an issue” and deals with the danger of pathologising the mentoring subject. The last of the seven is “opportunities for fun” – the value of humor in building rapport and encouraging creativity. This material will be familiar to people who have read other texts on mentoring.

So why this book, given the number of other titles available from these authors on mentoring? Its main value is as a collection of case studies that can be used as reference material for people setting up mentoring schemes. It is probably going to be of greater value to HR specialists and managers who have a rough idea about mentoring but who want, as the book’s title states, to know how it works in practice. The book can be summarized as a recipe for sandwiches. Two thin slices of bread (parts 1 and 4) with a variety of possible fillings (the organizational case studies) plus an indication of tastiness (the individual case studies).

Reviewed by Pete Sayers, head of people development at the University of Bradford, UK.

A version of this review was originally published in Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 38 No. 3, 2006.