# Mentoring Mentoring is a developmental relationship in which a more experienced person (the mentor) guides, advises and supports a less experienced one (the mentee or protégé). The word comes from Mentor, a character in Homer's *Odyssey*, whose form the goddess Athena takes to guide young Telemachus. Kathy Kram's research in the 1980s gave the classic description of what mentors do. They provide *career* functions (sponsorship, visibility, coaching, protection, challenging assignments) and *psychosocial* functions (role modeling, acceptance, counseling, friendship) that build the mentee's competence and sense of identity. Later researchers argue role modeling deserves to be a third function of its own. Mentoring can also run the other way: in reverse mentoring, a junior person helps a senior one, often with new tools or trends. Does it work? A 2008 multidisciplinary meta-analysis by Eby and colleagues found that mentoring is associated with favorable outcomes across youth, academic and workplace settings, but the effects are generally small, and larger for academic and workplace mentoring than for youth mentoring. Mentoring is often confused with coaching. A mentor shares their own experience and advice; a coach helps you find your own answers. See [[Mentoring VS Coaching]]. ## References - Kram, K. E. (1985). Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organizational Life (book) - Eby, L. T., Allen, T. D., Evans, S. C., Ng, T., & DuBois, D. L. (2008). Does mentoring matter? A multidisciplinary meta-analysis comparing mentored and non-mentored individuals. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 72(2), 254-267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2007.04.005 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentorship - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/mentorship/ ## Related - [[Mentoring VS Coaching]] - [[Deliberate Practice]] - [[Knowledge Workers]]