The secret: Cultivate a variety of mentors.
Many prominent leaders across the public and private sectors attribute their success to the strong mentoring relationships they developed in their careers. Even Bill Gates, who rose from nerdy, disheveled programmer to software company giant, benefited from an early mentoring relationship: As a student at Seattle's Lakeside High School, he landed his first computer job thanks to the guidance of a high school teacher, Fred Wright. Wright also mentored Gates' classmates and fellow computer club membersthree of whom went on to become programmers at Microsoft, and another, Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft.
In this book, management professors Ellen Ensher and Susan Murphy use Gates to explore the concept of "power mentoring." Power mentoring simply means that protégés do not rely on one particular person for support, but rather strategically cultivate a variety of mentors for support and advice.
The traditional mentoring relationship in corporate America used to involve an older, wiser executive who selected a protégé of similar background and career interests. Mentor and protégé may have attended the same college or shared the same social milieu. The mentor groomed the protégé in his image, dispensing professional wisdom as well as secrets of the organization.
Ensher and Murphy, who interviewed fifty leaders in a variety of industries to ensure that their study included women as well as people of color, have identified a pattern more common today. Protégés do not hesitate to ask for help and are eager to learn from others. While a privileged background certainly gives some people a boost, others in the study rose from modest beginnings and overcame obstacles to attain their current level of success.
The obvious audience for Power Mentoring is managers and professionals concerned about their own career development, but the book is also targeted at administrators of mentoring programs and anyone who teaches or conducts training about mentoring. It is hard to argue with the benefits of mentoring. But it is important to keep in mind that formal and informal mentoring programs within an organization carry the potential to emphasize inequity if such opportunities are not carefully institutionalized so that they are available to all staff.