Mentoring Executives and Directors
Mentoring Executives and Directors
David Clutterbuck and David MegginsonISBN: 0 75063 6955Butterworth Heinemann1999£19.99
Keywords Mentoring, Executives
The authors repeat their earlier 1995 definition "off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge work or thinking". The definition is important particularly because they give emphasis in the book to "significant transitions". In consequence, they see mentoring as particularly enabling and supporting major change. "As such it is about developing the whole person rather than training in particular skills … Mentoring needs to be a process which encourages new perspectives,changed ways of thinking, deeper self-knowledge."
The book reviews the authors' own experience, supplemented in considerable detail by interviews with other mentors and interesting case material. They produce the, to me, rather nice idea of "personal reflective space","the seized opportunity to develop personal insight through uninterrupted and purposeful reflective activity".
The authors' own material provides some very interesting frameworks through which you can either analyse what you propose to do with a mentor or review what you have actually done. They describe, for example, seven roles for a senior mentor, but offer three additional ones to which they give great emphasis –executive coach, elder statesperson and reflective mentor. One of the areas in which they believe the effective mentor must succeed is in separating the emotional and intellectual content of issues for themselves and enabling their mentees to do so. This leads to the point that mentors need to operate at different levels of need – emotion, business issues and leadership.
Finally, in their own section, Clutterbuck and Megginson look at the issue of what makes an effective executive mentee – a very good point which I have not seen discussed elsewhere.
The specific case studies quite deliberately provide different kinds of experience for different mentors with different mentees. The utility of the individual cases obviously depends on the interests of the reader. It would be surprising if there was not amongst the cases at least one which any reader would find thought-provoking.
With one exception, I was struck with the non-prescriptive style adopted. The lessons learned section, for example, while reviewing the experience of Clutterbuck and Megginson, does not presume to say that these are necessarily lessons which other people need to learn and implement (though most mentors could certainly usefully check off their own experience against these lessons).
The one exception to my view that this is a non-prescriptive book really arises from the definition given at the beginning of this review.
Any definition is of course necessarily prescriptive – it describes the boundaries of the authors' work. It would not be my view that mentoring at senior level is necessarily about "significant transitions", nor do I think it inevitably to be about "developing the whole person". But that criticism is outweighed by the helpful detailed content of the book (which does not actually in all cases reflect the definition).
Alan Mumford
