The Mentoring Advantage: Creating the Next Generation of Leaders

This book outlined effective strategies for large companies to implement mentoring as a means to lower employee turnover, allow growth and development within careers, and significantly increase a company's bottom line. Also addressed in the book was the fact that companies both large and small are now realizing the full potential of implementing formal mentoring programs as a means to speed to build corporate cohesiveness, shorten learning tracks and support diversity initiatives. The book makes it clear that mentoring in many forms is a population discussion topic nowadays not only within non-profit community organizations but also within the corporate world. Businesses need to be successful and you are learning that success is not achieved alone. Employees need guidance within the workplace to be successful and mentoring relationships harness the tools needed to ensure employees are successful. The book identifies a wide variety of tools that executives, managers, and employees can utilize while within a mentoring relationship such as checklists, templates, case studies, and tips. Within the book the author focused on using corporate mentoring for developmental purposes, designing a mentoring program for strategic purposes, from succession planning to diversity training, to lifelong learning. The author also used real life examples of mentoring relationship that were utilized within well-known corporations such as IBM and JP Morgan and Chase.

If you are looking to begin a new program or are new to mentoring this is an excellent resource for anyone.

My company already has a mentoring program that I take advantage of, along with mentor and mentee training. However, this book still taught me a lot, particulary around how to properly message, how to set expectations, and how to deal with difficult or uncomfortable circumstances. The book is good as a general introduction for those new to mentoring or mentoring programs, and provides some additional material for those who want to start a managed mentoring program at their institution. I'm not convinced it's comprehensive, but the author does a good job of giving both a high-level overview and tying it to concrete benefits.