Appendix 1: The Evolution of Modern Mentoring

Although mentoring is a concept that has only recently entered into the general vocabulary of business and society, it has a long pedigree. The word ‘mentor' originally comes from Greek mythology. Odysseus, before setting out for the Trojan War, entrusted his son to the care and direction of his old and trusted friend Mentor. (In fact, Mentor was not particularly helpful. It was the goddess Athena who was young Telemachus's real mentor. ) Yet in spite of the variety of definitions of mentoring (and the variety of names given to it, from coaching or counselling to sponsorship) all the experts and communicators appear to agree that modern mentoring has its origins in the concept of apprenticeship. In the days when the guilds ruled the commercial world, the road to the top in business began with an early apprenticeship to the master craftsman, a trader, or a ship's captain. This older, more experienced individual passed down his knowledge of how the task was done and how to operate in the commercial world.

Intimate personal relationships frequently developed between the master (or mentor) and the apprentice (or learner), especially as the apprentice acquired skills and began to substitute for his mentor. Marrying the master's daughter became an accepted means of providing career progression and retaining key skills with the firm.

The Industrial Revolution altered this emphasis, demanding large numbers of recruits, which swamped personalised attention. Apprenticeship often degenerated to the stage where it involved depersonalised mass training in technical areas. Within the large corporation there grew up informal, often hidden, methods of passing on the experience of old-timers to young recruits. At the lower levels, a supervisor might ‘keep an eye on' a promising employee. Senior managers might identify a potential high-flyer and provide him or her with confidential advice and encouragement. Although the term might not itself have had currency, therefore, mentoring was nonetheless at work.

In recent years, mentoring has also spread beyond the world of careers and work to embrace a wide spectrum of community needs. In the UK, for example, there are active mentoring programmes to help disadvantaged schoolchildren and university students to stick at and concentrate on their studies, young offenders to change their lives, teenage mothers to cope with their multiple responsibilities, and head teachers to improve the management of their schools. Now there are programmes to help the unemployed of all ages into the workforce.

There are also schemes to encourage creativity in the arts and sciences, and to support owner-entrepreneurs in developing their own competence in line with the increasing demands of their businesses.

The idea of formalising all this came from the United States, in the late 1970s, when a number of companies saw the potential in making this kind of sponsorship and guidance available to all their potential high-flying young men. It did not take long for other people to realise the possibilities of transferring this process into the wider community, and there soon came an explosion of community schemes, aimed in particular at young people at risk and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, with the aim of helping them build meaningful and useful lives. Inevitably, some of these had a diversity dimension to them, and mentoring gradually became co-opted to support programmes of positive action, both racial and gender-based.

Europe and Australasia were not far behind. But initial experiments with mentoring were often disappointing. Although sponsoring mentoring was acceptable informally, European business cultures resisted the idea of such overt godfathering behaviour. A very different style of mentoring evolved in employment - one in which the mentor's power and authority were not central to the relationship (although the mentor's experience was). In European, developmental mentoring, the relationship became a source of mutual support and learning. The role of the mentor was and is to enable the mentee to become independent as quickly as possible. (So big was this difference that European organisations dropped the US term protégé because it implied too many of the wrong associations. ) Community and academic mentoring remains a mixture of sponsoring and developmental mentoring, depending on practical experience and where the scheme organisers have taken their working model from. Many of the most extensive schemes - such as that to provide mentors from business for headteachers - now operate as peer learning exchanges.

The sheer range of mentoring schemes now in operation is enormous. Children as young as five are being mentored by older children between nine and 11. Thousands of children who have difficulty learning to read or write are being helped by learning mentors (although, as the scheme is currently structured, these are not really mentors but coaches/instructors). Gifted children are being helped to stick with their talents - for example, as musicians - by pairing up with retired professionals whose enthusiasm helps carry them through the many other distractions that assail teenagers. Black students at risk of giving up on their university studies are being supported by businesspeople. Other students are mentoring disabled or socially excluded pupils to help them make the transition into work or further education.

Once they do make it into the world of work, many people also find there is a mentor available to support them. We have helped dozens of companies establish programmes for their graduate and other young recruits. The benefits have been remarkable, especially in terms of the retention of this valuable talent. Mentoring has now become a standard part of the support for people taking professional qualifications - for example, in nursing or engineering. New teachers and experienced teachers who are having problems in the classroom can expect to have a mentor in many schools.

As people rise through the ranks of an organisation, at every major transition stage - such as their first supervisory role - a mentor can and often does provide an anchor for the tough decisions they have to make. One of the hardest transitions of all is for mothers returning to work after maternity leave. The emotional trauma involved in leaving the baby and re-establishing working relationships and skills can be greatly eased through mentoring from another mum who has been through the same experience.

There is now a wide range of mentoring schemes aimed at small businesses, from the very general to specific areas such as exporting. These help the entrepreneur put emphasis on his or her own growth as well as that of the business. Executives in business, public service and education are one of the fastest-growing audiences for mentoring - the lonelier and more complex the job at the top becomes, the greater the need for a sympathetic, knowledgeable but non-partisan sounding-board becomes. Other schemes we have been involved in in recent years include GPs starting to practise in drug addiction, successful asylum-seekers and artists. There have even been schemes to mentor people through the difficult transition into retirement.

In short, wherever you look, there is an increasing variety of applications of mentoring.

With all this diversity, one of the problems is a lack of effective integration, sharing of good practice and sharing of resources. Community, business and academic mentoring all follow their own routes.

My vision of ultimate mentoring is that everyone will have an opportunity to participate in and benefit from mentoring throughout their lives - that it will become a natural substitute for the extended family of village communities in previous centuries. I was gratified to hear recently of a school which had eliminated bullying by making every senior form responsible for mentoring pupils in junior forms. The cascade effect is very powerful.

We know that people who have positive experience of being a mentee typically make good and committed mentors. All we have to do is tap that enthusiasm. Instead of mentoring happening at rare, widely separated periods in our lives, in a mentoring community everyone would be mentor or mentee simultaneously for much of their lives. Because the vast majority of people who experience being a mentor find the role intensely fulfilling, this is not a pipedream.

Of course, there is a lot of work to do before such a vision is even partly realised. The vast amount of good practice out there is not integrated - and there is a lot of very bad practice, especially in executive mentoring. There are UK standards for mentoring in schools and youth justice, and international standards for mentoring in employment. They are not linked as yet.

There is considerable confusion over what the word ‘mentor' means. It is variously confused with ‘coach', ‘counsellor', ‘teaching assistant', ‘big brother' and ‘godfather'. In some circumstances the mentor has an authority role (eg some youth justice schemes, in which the mentor might be responsible for returning a young person to custody); in most developmental mentoring relationships, this would be unconscionable. The nature of the role and the clarity of understanding of the role by both parties in a mentoring relationship has a major impact on its success or failure.

Nor does it help that the quality of much academic research in the area is poor. Failure to define what is being measured is just one of these quality problems. This has led to great difficulties in determining how formal or informal a mentoring relationship should be. There has to be some structure, to provide a sense of purpose and, in the case of young or vulnerable people, a protective framework. But relationships also have to operate with a high degree of flexibility and personal rapport. Getting the balance right is a major challenge for scheme organisers.

Another challenge is balancing the need to stretch mentees against the need to provide support for them. Equipping mentors with the instinctive competence to adapt the challenge level to individual needs and circumstances is not easy - but it is essential in establishing relationships that will deliver results.