Articles

Monday, 06 May 2013 02:52

Mentoring and Storytelling as Training Techniques Featured

Written by
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Mentoring and Storytelling as Training Techniques

Organizations are made up of a group of people brought together for a common purpose. Therefore, organizations are socially constructed realities. They exist in the minds of its members. Knowledge is a key asset that allows organizations to compete in the marketplace. Knowledge only exists in the minds of the people in the organization, and built up over time through relationships. How is this knowledge transferred to other people in the organization?

Knowledge can be seen as being acquired through experience and through learning. Learning is the product that results through knowledge acquisition and experience. As new knowledge is acquired and applied in work situations a behavior change should occur. This behavior change is learning and can be seen as a source of new knowledge to be applied and tested in the work setting. Therefore, learning is a continuous process. With learning being a continuous process, we need to create opportunities where individuals can make unique contributions to the organization.

These unique contributions can emerge from mentoring and storytelling.

A mentor is typically a senior member of an organization who provides support, coaching, feedback, acceptance, and friendship. A mentor creates opportunities for exposure, provides challenging and educational assignments, and serves as a role model or counselor. Let’s take a consulting company as an example. A typical consulting company is set up to have a senior consultant working on teams with junior consultants. The junior consultants tend to make the presentations to the clients. This relationship is further solidified during the after hours where both the mentor and protégé create more personal relationships, such as meeting after hours for drink at the nearby bar. Most mentor relationships develop informally overtime. Research shows that the willingness to mentor is higher for those managers who had been a mentor or a protégé and had good relationships with their supervisors.

A typical mentor is one who is an expert who draws on his years of experience to extrapolate what works and what doesn’t work. Experts are able to express their knowledge using “rules of thumb.” They know the rules, they know how to get around the rules, and they know when there are exceptions to the rule.

Much of human learning happens through the vicarious experience of others. That is people learn incidentally by casual dialogue. One way mentoring can be effectively used is through the concept of role models. However, it is only as effective as the support by the organization. The processes of socialization can be aided or hindered by the organization. In some organizations, mentoring is seen by management as a form of fraternization, and therefore prohibited. Role Models can facilitate learning by allowing learning by observation and imitation, and positively reinforces socially acceptable behavior. Mentors teach norms of behavior and convey knowledge about the organization’s values. A mentor needs to display him or herself as an embodied symbol. A phrase such as “look right, be right” comes to mind. Your protégé or even other employees look up to you as a role model for doing the right things and behaving in the right way. If the protégé sees the mentor on the sales floor greeting and talking to customers, the protégé will imitate that behavior. In this way, the mentor is communicating the value of being passionately focused on customer value. The mentor/protégé relationship is about practicing what you preach.


About The Author Nick Roy is an HR Researcher, Consultant, and freelance business writer. He currently holds a Master of Business Administration and Master of Arts in Human Resources Management from Hawaii Pacific University, and a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality Management from Florida Metropolitan University, Fort Lauderdale. He is also currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Organizational Change from Hawaii Pacific University, with theses research on “The Impact of Technology on Human Resources and Organization Effectiveness.”


Click here to return to the index of Articles


Read 1060 times Last modified on Monday, 15 November 2021 15:00

Comments powered by CComment

Latest Posts

  • Sakshi
    I have been in a state of ‘emotional unwell-being’ for seven years. There, I’ve said it. Why? Well, after my father died, I believed that if I reached out with love to ‘good friends’, counsellors, suitors, and relatives, there could be pockets of joy to offset my grief and loneliness,…
  • The Creative Industry Needs to Look at Things Differently Post Budget 2022
    On 29 October 2021, the Finance Minister, Datuk Seri Tengku Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz tabled Budget 2022 in the Malaysian parliament. RM50 million has been allocated for the arts and culture industry. This comes after a year and a half after the entire industry came to an absolute standstill. With…
  • ‘The Covid Positives’ – life lessons learnt from the pandemic by Phanindra Ivatury
    After a long drawn battle with the biggest catastrophe in our living memory, global humanity is finally getting to see some quintessential ray of light at the end of the treacherous tunnel in the form of COVID-19 vaccines, currently being rolled out to all parts of the globe. A ‘COVID-19…
  • Chaos of Whole Books
    Is it possible to read several books at once? Aneeta Sundararaj finds out. When I was a child, my cousin used to boast that he could read four storybooks at a time. As an adult, when he invested in an e-Reader, he continued to boast that he could…
  • Writing for You? Or for Me?
    Writing for You? Or for Me? ‘You must always write with your reader in mind.’ This was one of the first pieces of advice that I received when I began my writing career. Honestly, I found this extremely hard to do because more often than not, I couldn’t picture my…