Mentoring Revisited: A phenomenological reading of the literature

Abstract

This paper details the outcomes of an exploration to describe what the mentoring concept is and how it may best be communicated. The rationale is twofold: firstly, on a personal level, despite being a mentor and researching mentoring for several years, I still found describing and sharing explanations of mentoring with others difficult to achieve with any degree of consensus. Without such a consensus, how may we ever know that we are talking about the same thing? Secondly, my own confidence in what mentoring may be was affected by discovering that the claimed origins of the very term were erroneous. As a consequence, a phenomenological reduction—whereby the inquirer 'brackets' any suppositions and previously thought knowledge prior to exploration—was deployed in order to review a sample of mentoring research and debate covering a time period 1978-1999 across several disciplines. Mentoring appears to have the essential attributes of: a process; a supportive relationship; a helping process; a teaching-learning process; a reflective process; a career development process; a formalised process; and a role constructed by or for a mentor. The contingent attributes of the mentoring phenomenon appear as: coaching; sponsoring; role modelling; assessing; and an informal process. In addition, the consequences of the concept were explored, and a lexical definition of mentoring offered. This paper concludes that if we are ever to address the question; 'if we do not agree on what mentoring is, how do we know if we are talking about the same thing?' then attention to and exploration and discussion of our perceptions of the concept may be a suitable starting point.