ABSTRACT

This chapter explains different kinds of mentoring, provides tips on recognizing and attracting mentors, and suggests how to navigate the mentee/mentor experience. Mentoring supports school and career choices, coaches for better job performance, and more broadly, helps identify the mentee's core purpose(s). Some mentors provide support and encouragement, whereas others offer challenges. The chapter deals with a glimpse into the mentor's motivation and perspective. Mentors may be teachers, friends, acquaintances, managers, employees, and colleagues. Some mentoring relationships occur over many decades, whereas others are one-time interactions. Certain interactions are explicit mentoring, others are informal, while still others are the byproduct of interactions that are not considered as mentoring. Mentors can be current professors or managers, or someone who has no power over the mentee. In the former, the power relationship should be acknowledged because the mentor is also evaluating the mentee.