Mentoring: what is it? How do we do it and how do we get more of it?

Although mentoring is something most of us talk about doing and needing on a regular basis, it isn’t obvious what being a mentor means, precisely, or what the process of mentoring entails. Is it the same as training? teaching? advising? Is being a mentor the same as being a good role model? Are these all labels for the same thing? Having agreed to talk about mentoring at this event in honor of Harold Luft, I did what any good researcher of today would do——I googled the term. I discovered that there are a fair number of websites out there dedicated to the topic. The term is used by organizations that focus on youth mentoring, including an organization called Mentor that stresses ‘‘Expanding the world of quality mentoring,’’ as well as those promoting business mentoring, and, something more familiar to many of us, academic mentoring. Further evidence that this is a global concept, there’s even an International Mentoring Association. My search also revealed a large selection of books and articles with mentoring in the title (e.g., ‘‘Toward a Conceptualization of Mentoring,’’ Anderson and Shannon 1988) and even a software package offered by one business consulting firm called ‘‘Mentoring that Makes a Difference.’’ While not an exhaustive search, I was nonetheless amazed by the range of uses and lack of consensus out there about what mentoring is, much less how to do it and get