Beyond the Myths and Magic of Mentoring: How to Facilitate an Effective Mentoring Process, New and Revised Edition

Chapter One

What Mentoring Is—and What It Is Not

If we are to believe the media and literature, literally hundreds of organizations have implemented some type of mentoring program in the past ten years. Millions of people from primary school to almost retirement age are in mentoring relationships. What is fascinating is that there are still two basic schools of thought about mentoring. One is the belief that mentoring can be structured or facilitated; the other is the belief that it can only “happen,” to a lucky or aggressive few people.

In an attempt to bring some understanding of various processes called mentoring, and to allow comparison of features of informal and facilitated, I coined this definition:

Facilitated mentoring is a structure ...