Mentors bring great goodwill to their role as mentors. But that doesn’t mean they are skilled. It doesn’t mean they have thought about the different approaches to mentoring. It doesn’t mean they have thought about alternative ways of doing careers. It doesn’t mean they’ve had the opportunity to reflect on or mitigate their bias. It doesn’t mean they’ve had good mentoring experiences themselves to draw on.
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Creating more gender equitable and inclusive cultures is high on the agenda for many organisations. However there is often a disconnect between existing staff development activities and efforts to create the desired cultures. More explicitly linking individual development to organisational change can make a big difference to the return on investment when developing staff. The ‘bifocal approach’ translates this ideal into reality through clear principles and program design.
Playing the career game - the role of mentors
I am not being flippant when I use the word game.. What I am doing is calling attention to the need for a strategic approach to building a career. Much like a game, many careers and workplaces have intricate rules, some written but many of them unwritten, that you learn over time and with experience. There is complexity, with choices and decisions that lead to different payoffs, requiring various degrees of risk, and a need to look a few moves ahead. You get the idea. Careers don’t just happen. It is this career complexity that can make mentoring so valuable.
Read MoreWho cares about your career?
Careers do not take place in isolation, they require webs of enabling relationships. Your career success is not just a function of your talent and hard work. It also depends on the culture of your organisation, your leaders, and your peers. Leaders, supervisors, and peers all play a part in building the web, as do you.
If your organisation is not helping to co-create your career, then it’s time to take action yourself.
Read MoreA better ROI. Spend your unconscious bias training budget on developing your leaders as sponsors →
Many organisations are rolling out unconscious bias training. I have a better idea, based on research and practice, for tackling leadership bias in ways that are positive, actionable, measurable and support good leadership. Putting the spotlight on, and improving the sponsorship practices of your leaders can better support your E and I work.
Read MoreSponsorship: An equity and diversity game changer?
I am very proud to announce my long awaited report Sponsorship: Creating Career Opportunities for Women in Higher Educationis now available here for free download. This sponsorship guide is a practical publication, based on research examining sponsorship practices and my decades of experience with mentoring and leadership programs within the higher education sector.
I believe sponsorship can be an equity and diversity game-changer. Read on for an overview of why.
Read MoreWhat is sponsorship and why is it so important for women?
What is the big deal about sponsorship? A few years ago we didn’t even talk about sponsorship. Women were being urged to find mentors, and now this advice is being replaced with women being urged to find sponsors. This change in tack is nicely encapsulated in the title of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book (Forget a mentor) Find a Sponsor. Her subtitle The New Way to Fast-Track your Career also provides some insight into the positive hype surrounding sponsorship.
In this blog I want to talk about the research that brought sponsorship into the limelight, and why it is important, particularly but not exclusively from a gender perspective, to distinguish between mentoring and sponsorship.
Read MoreSummer reading: 'Humble Inquiry' and its applicability to mentoring
‘We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling’
Working with mentors is one of the hardest things I do. So, when I was drawn to the title of Edgar Schein’s book Humble Inquiry I approached it with this in mind. What, if anything, might be helpful for mentors in this book? Did it contain anything useful in developing their understanding and skills as mentors?
Read More‘I don’t want to be mentored back into the straight line’
My title, ‘I don’t want to be mentored back into the straight line’, quoting a recent research participant, captures very succinctly a key difficulty with mentoring, and one that is almost entirely overlooked by mentoring practitioners and mentoring programs. I understood exactly what my interviewee meant, from both a research and practice perspective. Mentoring can inadvertently be used to help mentees to ‘fit in’, where mentors reinforce gendered norms and cultural stereotypes, teaching mentees to succeed the way they succeeded.
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