Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring

ONE

Building the Framework for Mentoring across Differences

When Mia and Christopher met for the first time, they were immediately struck by the ways in which they were not alike: gender, age, self-expression, and power differential within the organization. You will likely observe substantial differences between you and your mentoring partner. Some things (like ethnicity, race, and gender) may be easy to see; and some things (like values, motivation, and background) are not so visible. Often, we make unconscious assumptions about the meaning of what we see, and those assumptions may be incorrect because ethnicity, race, and gender are not always obvious and don’t always follow an archetype. Nonetheless, each element of identity, and the assumptions ...