As adults move from school into the workplace, learning from teachers in formal settings often shifts to learning from mentors in more informal settings. However, in this new environment, being a successful mentee is often more important than having a successful mentor. Being a successful mentee means growing in self-awareness and persistent towards finding out the right answers to your specific dilemmas. Learning to ask the right questions to the right people in the right ways at the right time is a true skill. Fortunately, this book seeks to coach us all on how we can learn better and gain more success in contemporary life.
Koester believes that a lot of people currently approach mentoring wrong. They look for the “perfect mentor” to guide them through all of life’s persistent questions. In his experience (and mine), that single person simply does not exist. Instead, current-day mentors tend to provide knowledge-based opportunities and connections that lead to success. Highly successful mentors (he calls them “super mentors,” though this term seems cheesy to me) are motivated by working with interesting people on interesting projects. Thus, the challenge is identifying these people and getting on their radar.
Koester teaches classes on business mentoring at Georgetown University and has gathered much of his framework on his interactions with students about to enter the business world. However, most of his exploration is in words, not numerical, as he analyzes success stories about how mentoring played a role in catapulting the mentee towards success. Through a private partnership, he collected his own qualitative data about highly effective mentoring relationships and shared his findings in this book. Unfortunately, he did not pursue the more difficult – and fruitful – task of finding quantitative data. (Qualitative data about mentoring is abundant in the literature, but statistical analyses on this topic are in short supply.)
This book is fairly focused on mentoring in the mainstream business world. I would have liked to have read more about mentoring among historically marginalized groups, like women, underrepresented minority groups, and LGBTQ+ communities. Explorations of non-business environments – like academe, K-12 education, and professions like nursing, law, or medicine – would have increased this book’s robustness. Many of the most interesting aspects of mentoring, a rich and complex topic, dwell in these niches.
Certainly, this book will likely draw an audience among those in the business world who seek mentoring and career development. The concepts need expansion, however, and I hope Koester is able to pursue further probing into these areas to share with us more insights. Although many initial insights are shared, this book is specifically geared towards mainstream business environments. Further research down the road could more broadly describe what successful mentoring relationships look like in the early twenty-first century.
Super Mentors: The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Asking Extraordinary People for Help
By Eric Koester, with Adam Saven
Copyright (c) 2022
New Degree Press
ISBN13 9798885042901
Page Count: 341
Genre: Mentoring, Business
www.amazon.com