Cultivating the Garden of Mentoring

A little over 20 years ago, the first seeds of mentoring research were planted in a foundational book: Mentoring at Work (Kram, 1985). More than 20 years of research and exploration in the field of mentoring have now passed, and it is time for us to step back and assess where we have been, where we are, and where we need to go in the field. It is time for us to take a “bird's-eye view⇝ of the landscape of mentoring, to plant new seeds, break new theoretical ground, and design sound bridges between the practice and study of mentoring and other developmental relationships. The Handbook of Mentoring at Work was designed to meet these goals by chronicling the current state of the field and by cultivating new directions for theory, research, and practice in the field of mentoring.

As we pondered how best to approach this task, we realized that the field of mentoring may be likened to a garden. Some parts of the garden have been carefully cultivated by mentoring scholars and have blossomed and matured over the past 20 years, while other parts hold great promise but have been relatively neglected. (One could even argue that parts of the mentoring garden have been overwatered and over fertilized!). We soon came to recognize that for our mentoring garden to flourish, we need a soil that is theoretically rich with the cross fertilization of ideas from related disciplines; new tools that reflect seismic changes in technology, organizational structures, and career paths; and, most important, a vision for the future that unveils a landscape rich with opportunities for research grounded in theory but driven by practice.

Toward that end, we invited a stellar group of scholars and practitioners to become “landscape designers⇝ in the garden of mentoring. Our garden offers three paths. First, to understand the current state of the field, we invited mentoring scholars, who represent virtually every key contributor in the field, to offer their unique insights to this volume. We asked these scholars to chronicle the current state of research in their areas and to offer fresh new visions for future research that cultivates and grows the field of mentoring.

Second, we sought to enrich and broaden the theoretical soil of mentoring by inviting leading scholars in related fields to apply their theoretical lenses to the [Page x]discourse on mentoring. These scholars planted fresh new seeds that enrich the garden of mentoring and extend the horizons of mentoring to incorporate new theoretical perspectives.

Third, to craft vital new bridges between the study and practice of mentoring, we asked leading practitioners in the field to share their best practices and their innovative new approaches in the practice of mentoring. Because mentoring research needs to both inform and be informed by practice, we asked these contributors to identify research that needs to be done to address the changing practice of mentoring. Their chapters offer the critical perspective that growth in the garden of mentoring requires not only the careful cultivation of both practice and research but also the complementary crossfertilization of needs, knowledge, and practice that yields important new hybrids of developmental relationships.

Combined, the three paths cultivated in this volume offer rich insight into where we have been, provocative new ideas for where we can go, and practical perspectives on the best way to get there. We hope this volume offers the reader a vision of a richly landscaped garden of mentoring: a garden in which mentoring research, theory, and practice can flourish.