Simone J. Nathan, Chief Operating Officer Electronic Long Distance Learning Network
A Mentor's Companion is a practical compendium of action and reflection. Its seven brief chapters are designed to help individuals improve on-the-job performance in collaboration with colleagues, supervisors, senior executives and peers. The author aptly states that this not a "beach book", but understates its powerful clarity in addressing meaningful change in behaviors that impact portable learning skills. The book is the product of practical application and thoughtful experimentation derived from two decades of local, regional, national and international consulting. With their consulting staff, Ambrose and his partner, James Perrone, provide management counsel, organization development and human resource issue resolution. Drawing on ingredients from the financial sector, health, retail, publishing, manufacturing and a host of service industries, the Companion serves rich fare from real recipes to those who hunger for performance power. Groups, teams and professionals-at-large can get a lot to digest from this big little book. One of its most intriguing flavors is its case demonstration of a female executive in the high tech industry successfully mentoring a male colleague to improve team effectiveness.


Book Description
A Mentor's Companion is a book written for the active or prospective mentor. Its goal is to be a focused, practical guide into the texture of the mentoring interaction between mentor and protg. Combining a unique recipe of live dialogues between a mentor and her protg, with guidelines that glean the key learning from the dialogues, the book teaches the "moves" the mentor should consider in maximizing the learning possibilities for the protg. Each dialogue and summary is followed by a third course - menus of questions and statements from which the mentor can sample when preparing a mentoring conversation. . As a part of their mission, mentors give advice, but this book is not a "how to give advice" book. The concentration, instead, is on using oneself as a catalyst with the mentee (who is also referred to as "protege" or "partner"). The mission of this book is to distinguish and dramatize the skills of the mentor-those probes, those challenges, those inquiries and provocative questions that will inspire thought, stimulate reflection, tap discovery, and generate a new intelligence in the protg. The early chapters describe the mentoring process, the purpose of mentoring, what it is and what it isn't, and the kinds of skills necessary to develop as a mentor. The purpose of later chapters is to carry the mentor through the mentoring action itself, dramatizing it with examples, guidelines, and specific menus of questions and inputs for interacting with the mentee. Each chapter features a different major activity one can expect to engage in with a protg: making contact and getting acquainted, working on problems, giving performance and behavioral feedback, making developmental assignments, and conducting after-action reviews. This is probably not a "beach" book. It's also not a book the mentor will likely read from beginning to end-in fact, skipping around is recommended, using what is most relevant at the appropriate moment. It is, however, a valuable reference and guide for any aspect of the mentoring charge. A Mentor's Companion's vision is to accompany the mentor as he or she takes on the important challenge of helping others unlock their true potential.


From the Author
I wanted to write a book that would teach the mentor the specifics about behaving as a role model, teacher, coach, catalyst, ally and strategist. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how a person can strategically affect the professional life of someone else by fostering insight, identifying needed knowledge and expanding the other person's horizons. I hope I've been able to do that through the live dialogues, explanations and behavioral menus in the book. I needed to write this book, to pull together and share the lessons learned from being in the business of mentoring for years. The first reason I wrote the book is to help the reader to leap past all the mistakes I have made in trying to be a mentor and teach others how - the stuff that can help readers be the best mentors they can be - quickly. The second reason I wrote the book is what excites me about being a mentor and helping others to be. I want to change the world! I have learned that you can help change the world by subtly affecting what happens to people every day on the job. Workers have struggled for eons to achieve dignity in their work - no matter what that work is. People with dignity grow and blossom; those without it don't, they wither. It is terribly simple. Mentoring is a way to give people their dignity. You will change the world a little every time you help someone grow, learn something new, become more aware of what they can do, see new satisfaction, achieve a place. You will change their experience of each of their days, and that will change them.


About the Author
Larry Ambrose brings over 30 years of varied experience as a manager, teacher and consultant to the field of managerial leadership and productivity. A co-founder of the management and organization development consulting firm, Perrone-Ambrose Associates in 1973, Mr. Ambrose' consulting has emphasized increasing the degree of trust in organizations and diminishing the distance between leaders and those they lead. Mr. Ambrose specializes in custom-designing mentoring programs for all types of organizations, including mentoring skill building for mentors and their proteges, or "mentees". Mr. Ambrose, with his partner, James Perrone, created the Mentors 2000 Series, which focuses on shaping the learning organization of the future through building the "mentoring culture". This innovative approach is currently being utilized by such progressive American organizations as Anixter Corporation; George C. Marshall Space Flight Center; Advanced Micro Devices, U.S. Steel; Advocate Health Care System; Cigna Insurance and a variety of other companies dedicated to the goal of assisting skilled and seasoned members of the organizations to pass on their expertise to others. Mr. Ambrose has designed and installed comprehensive management development and performance management systems for a broad array of organizations, advising top management and human resources managers. He has authored complete performance planning texts to support these programs and has trained managers and employees in them for such clients as ESPN, Getty Oil Company, Commonwealth Edison Company, Holt, Rinehart & Winston Publishers. Mr. Ambrose holds a Bachelors Degree from the University of Illinois and a Masters in organization behavior from George Williams College. He is a member of the Human Resource Management Association of Chicago and the Organization Development Network. Mr. Ambrose is the author of a new book, A Mentors Companion, published in October, 1998. The Companion is written as a practical compendium of action and reflection, designed to help individuals improve on-the-job performance in collaboration with colleagues, supervisors, senior executives and peers.


Excerpted from A Mentor's Companion by Larry Ambrose. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
From Introduction and Chapter 1: Mentors are participating in a kind of revolution. The sheer rapidity of change in business and society has made us question the existence of the corporation as we know it. What threat does downsizing pose to trust in the organization; how do we prepare future leaders in an increasingly complex world; how do we deal with the aging and increasingly diverse work force? These and many other questions cause us to seek guidance on how to respond, how to cope, and how to thrive within this changing environment. Mentoring is not the only answer, but it is a practical response to the need to rebuild the workplace as a locale in which employees can place their trust, realize their potential, and find honor. Good mentors inspire their proteges to learn and grow; to see new things and new possibilities not only in their jobs, but in themselves. Sometimes the very fact of having a mentor will give a person confidence enough to move into new areas of experience and make harder decisions involving both themselves and others. This is your task: to inspire, challenge, and direct your protege-to instill in him or her the confidence and responsibility to take informed, calculated risks resulting in a more creative contribution to the job. In the course of your mentoring, you will find that there are several ways to do this. You will be an ally, a catalyst, and a coach. All are important. In fact, you may find yourself switching hats often. Within these three main areas you will find that a mentor must be a teacher, an advisor, a planner, a pathfinder, a protector, a supporter, a role model, a tactician, a storyteller, and a lot more. The Mentor As an Ally Employees who choose to participate in a mentoring program are serious about their growth and development. That doesn't mean, however, that there might not be some fear or misgivings about what they are getting into and who they have to deal with. Trust is the most important part of beginning a mentor/mentee relationship. Without it, there can be little benefit to either party. To have a successful relationship, you both must feel comfortable in expressing your thoughts and feelings. If this can be achieved in your initial meetings, it will be easier to give and respond to feedback later. That implies a partnership in which you are both equal contributors. And as you work closely with your mentee, that initial fear will disappear, replaced by the challenge of learning and growth. When the mentoring relationship has endured some tests and you both have demonstrated your dedication to it and each other, your dealings will become more natural. A good relationship allows you to show occasional exasperation with each other. Faith in the developing partnership will allow you more freedom to be yourselves. Hopefully, you will find yourself able to be completely spontaneous in your reaction to your partner's progress (or lack of it), worrying less and less how you phrase the feedback. In turn, the mentee will trust that you have his or her best interests at heart and will appreciate your honest and direct response. The Mentor As a Catalyst One of the reasons you have taken on a mentoring assignment is that either you or someone in your organization has noticed the potential for growth in your mentee-an interest, an openness, a promise. It is your job to stimulate that promise. And here's the easy part: the most important thing you can do as a catalyst is to just be yourself. You are a role model that your mentees can look up to and possibly pattern themselves after. Through your demeanor, reaction to circumstances, style, work habits, strength, passion, and compassion, you are a role model for the kind of person the partner can aspire to be. Best yet, role modeling is all the more inspiring if you are also the vehicle by which the mentee can achieve those aspirations. This means that, in addition to being an object of emulation, you become an active agent, energetically helping your mentees to realize their full potential. One way to achieve this is by sharing some of your wisdom and experience. In this way you will be accelerating their growth by giving them something that they would otherwise have had to learn the hard way. At other times you may decide that the best way for your proteges to learn is to put them in the battle and have them duke it out for themselves. That's when you become the real agent provocateur-the one who stands in the center of a situation of your own making and monitors what goes on. So how do you decide when to shine a light or when to light a fuse? That's where strategy comes in. The Mentor As a Strategist As a strategist, you will assist the mentee in selecting and organizing experiences for growth and learning. Specifically, you and your protege must discuss the person's long-term developmental goals, consider work assignments or experiences aimed at fulfilling those aims, and track progress. Such assignments may involve exposing your mentee to particularly challenging experiences that he or she might not encounter if not for your involvement. These assignments can be challenges such as fix-it projects, start-up programs, joint tasks with another department, or coaching a less experienced individual-whatever you think is appropriate. It is important that you make use of these real-life situations as teaching opportunities. In the tactical sense you will be helping the mentees grow and learn from their experiences, whether planned or serendipitous. The coaching you do on these occasions-which may be either prior to or following an assignment or experience-should have the effect of drawing out the mentees through listening and questioning, tactics which will test their thinking and propel them to analyze steps of action and consider alternatives. In this capacity, you try to empower the mentees to think critically, make choices, and commit to a thought-out course of action. In doing this you are expressing your conviction and confidence in your proteges' intelligence and ability. It is important, even crucial, to cultivate and nurture a trusting and sustaining mentor/mentee relationship-one in which you and your protege will have a great affinity for one another. But if you ignore or do not develop the tactical communication skills of coaching, you will inevitably fall back on giving advice, telling stories, and providing your proteges too many answers that they would be better off producing for themselves. The mentor who is equipped with tactical mentoring skills eventually succeeds in "growing" the proteges to the empowered position of being able to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. And that is one of the ultimate goals of mentoring in the first place.