The Mentoring Manual

Citation

Mann, S. (2001), "The Mentoring Manual", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 88-92. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2001.22.2.88.2

Mentoring schemes are becoming quite trendy since organisations today, keen to reduce the costs involved in staff turnover, are searching desperately for cheap methods to increase retention of staff. Mentoring, defined in the book as “providing guidance, support and practical help through life crises or into new stages of development”, is one such way, the theory being that new staff will be more likely to stay with a company if they are given valuable help at the start. Providing the means for more experienced staff to provide that help is thus the idea behind mentoring.

The Mentoring Manual is concerned more with the implementation of mentoring schemes than with actual skill development, although such skills are alluded to frequently. The aims of the text include helping the reader to understand what practical mentoring is all about, helping the reader actually to establish their own mentoring programme and convincing readers of the benefits of such schemes. One of the big selling points for me is that it includes material (such as planning reviews, models and questionnaires) that can be photocopied.

The book is made up of just six chapters – which seemed surprisingly brief to me (perhaps there isn’t all that much to say about mentoring?). When I discovered that the first chapter was a short “Introduction” that in most other texts would have been called a “preface” (including material such as how the book is organised and how to use the book), I couldn’t help feel a little suspicious that the book was bing “padded out” somewhat. However, the quality of the text did improve after this disappointing start, although I did feel that the heavy emphasis on case studies made for a rather disjointed read; I would rather have seen overall advice and guidance developed from the summative experiences of the authors, as opposed to having to read several case studies, each with their own learning points.

The third chapter, “Practical considerations” was, I felt, one of the stronger parts of the book, although once again, I felt critical of the structure of the chapter which was divided into three parts, the second of which was simply a summary of the first. However, the chapter did outline the 11 key areas of mentoring (such as setting objectives, key roles, the matching process, training and evaluation) with great clarity and included many photocopiable forms and questionnaires. The fourth chapter was another very brief one, this time devoted to “taking action”, and this was followed by another good chapter on “developing mentoring skills” – much of which was taken from the authors’ earlier work, 32 Activities on Coaching and Mentoring. The final chapter entitled “Writers’ personal reflections” is simply about five pages of diary excerpts relating to the authors’ recent mentoring experiences – again, I felt that this did not warrant an entire chapter on its own.

Overall then, I felt somewhat conned by the deceptive size of this book, which in reality only contained two or thee worthwhile chapters. While reading it, I was left with the distinct feeling that the authors were keen to produce a book even though there was not really enough content to warrant it – hence employing the somewhat desperate measures of sticking diary notes in as Chapter 6 and calling the preface Chapter 1. However, if you can put value for money aside, the useful parts of this book really are very useful and the authors’ attempts to produce a readable, practical text are definitely realised. The bottom line is that I think this text would be helpful to managers trying to establish mentoring schemes – but only because the relative newness of the field means that there are few serious competitors out there!