Mentoring relationships are point-blank critical to career development. They’re not just for the school setting but for anyone interested in a growing career. This book, written by three MDs in academic medicine, delineates the principles of mentoring based on research and experiences. It concisely teaches how to be both an effective mentor and an effective mentee (an under-appreciated virtue). Finally, it has a lengthy appendix (around 50 pages) that provides summaries of articles about mentoring, including many outside of academic medicine.
The authors break this subject into three sections: For mentors, for mentees, and for both. They don’t waste a lot of verbiage and instead dive head-first into the operative principles in these roles. They talk about how to pursue these relationships and even how to end unhelpful ones. Special discursions on gender and generational divides explore a couple topics in depth. Notably, race, which has re-arisen in the American consciousness since 2019, is not discussed in detail, only broadly. These authors possess a clear passion for mentoring, albeit in a time-crunched manner.
This book’s main shortcoming is that it lacks personal anecdotes, presumably with the intention of protecting private information. However, this glaring omission avoids an essential human component to the practice of mentoring. The authors seem more like medical scientists lecturing on theory than people engaging in the formation of individual persons. The authors readily acknowledge that mentoring is not a “one-size-fits-all” practice; it would have been nice to observe that principle in practice through their writing.
This book is ideal for those interested in a power-packed theory of mentoring with little time wasted on fluff. At around 130 pages, it’s incredibly short with a lot of “oomph.” It’s even shorter if the reader skips the 50-page appendix, though a lot of helpful material remains in that ancillary chapter. This work is housed within the framework of academic medicine and is most suited for medical/clinical audiences. About half of the cited research are from medical journals, but the other half are from the world of business. Although general principles can be extracted, medical training is clearly the venue for these three authors. (It would have been nice to branch out into another field or two of graduate training to provide some breadth and robustness to the theory.) Overall, this work provides a concise, power-packed overview of mentoring for mentors and mentees and can get relationships quickly moving in a positive direction.
The Mentoring Guide: Helping Mentors and Mentees Succeed
By Vineet Chopra, Valerie M. Vaughn, & Sanjay Saint
Copyright (c) 2019
Michigan Publishing
ISBN13 9781607855392
Page Count: 131
Genre: Mentoring
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