Product Description

In order to succeed in today’s competitive environment, corporate and nonprofit institutions must create a workplace climate that encourages employees to continue to learn and grow. From the author of the best-selling The Mentor’s Guide comes the next-step mentoring resource to ensure personnel at all levels of an organization will teach and learn from each other. Written for anyone who wants to embed mentoring within their organization, Creating a Mentoring Culture is filled with step-by-step guidance, practical advice, engaging stories, and includes a wealth of reproducible forms and tools. 

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60614 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780787964016
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
Creating a Mentoring Culture

In order to succeed in today's competitive environment, corporate and nonprofit institutions must create a workplace climate that encourages employees to continue to learn and grow. From the author of the best-selling The Mentor's Guide comes the next-step mentoring resource to ensure personnel at all levels of an organization will teach and learn from each other. Written for anyone who wants to embed mentoring within their organization, Creating a Mentoring Culture is filled with step-by-step guidance, practical advice, engaging stories, and includes a wealth of reproducible forms and tools.

"This is a must-read for anyone seeking a rich understanding of how the spirit of mentoring can be truly integrated into an organization. I know of nothing like this book on the market. Zachary has scored another first!"
—Laurent A. Parks Daloz, associate director and faculty of the Whidbey Institute

"Successful, sustainable leadership cultures are grounded in a strong, thriving culture of mentoring. This book provides leaders and organizations the tools and inspiration to achieve just that."
—Pernille Lopez, president, IKEA North America

"One-stop shopping from A to Z if you want to launch or scale up a mentoring initiative. . . .This guidebook shows how different kinds of mentoring work together for individual development and organizational change. Wisdom and experience are embedded in a wealth of guidelines, checklists, and other tools to walk you through everything you need to know and do to be organizationally successful. Zachary becomes your 'virtual' consultant for scaffolding an effective organizational mentoring culture, infrastructure, and practice."
—Victoria J. Marsick, professor, adult education and organizational learning, and codirector, J.M. Huber Institute for Learning in Organizations

"Even mentors need mentoring. Mentoring supports employees in realizing the need for and meeting the challenge of being more productive as a result of successfully balancing work and family life. Zachary offers a much-needed just-in-time resource for helping HRD directors, CEOs, and organizational leaders expand and enhance the possibilities for elevating mentoring within their organizations."
—Susan Ginsberg, editor and publisher, Work & Family Life newsletter, and author, Family Wisdom

About the Author
Lois J. Zachary is president of Leadership Development Services, LLC, a Phoenix-based consulting firm providing leadership development, coaching, education, and training for corporate and nonprofit organizations nationwide. She is a nationally recognized expert in mentoring. Her innovative mentoring approaches and expertise in coaching leaders and their organizations in designing, implementing, and evaluating learner-centered mentoring programs has made her an award-winning consultant. She is the author of the best-selling The Mentor's Guide from Jossey-Bass.

Customer Reviews

The healthiest organizations have a mentoring culture
In an increasingly competitive business world, the need for having what Peter Senge describes as a "total learning environment" is greater now than ever before. With all due respect to formal training programs, my own experience has convinced me that on-the-job training (especially cross-functional training) remains the most effective means by which to create and then sustain such an environment. Hence the importance of mentoring relationships which, Zachary correctly points out, "offer an opportunity for individuals to nurture seeds in others so they might become blossoms, and blossoms might become fruit, which then nourishes others." Moreover, "When mentoring relationships are rooted in the fertile soil of a mentoring culture, they also enrich the quality of organizational life."

Zachary carefully organizes her material within two Parts. First, she explains what effective mentoring involves, how to embed it in a culture, how to integrate mentoring within that culture, and then how to implement mentoring initiatives. In Part 2, after identifying the hallmarks of effective mentoring, she focuses on key components: infrastructure, alignment, accountability, communication, value and visibility, demand, multiple mentoring opportunities, education and training, and "safety nets. " What we have in this single volume is a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system rather than a kaleidoscope of data, anecdotes, personal experiences, bromides, simplistic observations, and all manner of disjointed recommendations. That said, it would be a fool's errand to try to implement all of Zachary's system as is. As she would be the first to point out, all organizational cultures are different and many of them consist of several sub-cultures. Therefore, it remains for each reader to read and then re-read this book, complete the "Mentoring Culture Audit" (Appendix A), and (if possible) check out at least some of the resources recommended (Appendix B).

Regrettably, formal education often fails to help students to "learn how to learn." As a result, many people either do not realize what they don't know or, worse yet, think they fully understand what in fact they do not. My own experience suggests that, in general, people do not fear change; rather, they fear the unknown. That same experience also supports Derek Bok's observation that "If you think education is experience, try ignorance." Effective mentoring, therefore, requires humility and patience as well as knowledge and competence. The best mentors sincerely care about serving the best interests of those with whom they are privileged to be associated. They are passionate life-long learners themselves. Their enthusiasm is often contagious.

Obviously, I think very highly of this book. Zachary combines all of the skills of a cultural anthropologist with those of a clear thinker and eloquent writer. I also appreciate the CD-ROM which the publisher provides with it. Those who read the book can then review its key points while completing interactive exercises. The multiple templates can then assist the necessary modifications of the core concepts when applying them.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Zachary's The Mentor's Guide as well as Senge's The Fifth Discipline and then The Dance of Change, Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We know, David Maister's Practice What You Preach, and Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines For Excellence.

Start-up help for mentoring programs
Dr. Zachary's book plots the entire process for creating a mentoring culture in the organization. Her book offers clear steps to identify all the issues that need to be addressed prior to a program design and implementation. The book provides insight into the levels of buy-in and commitment needed for mentoring to be successful and imbedded in an organization. Mentoring is a powerful way to engage leadership in their personal growth and development and the advancement of the organization.
This is an easy to read and use guide. The CD is a great gift offering the forms for the exercises.

Breadth and Depth
"Creating a Mentoring Culture" goes well beyond traditional guides for designing and implementing mentoring programs by touching the core of an organization's capacity to embed learning and leadership development throughout its structures and processes. Dr. Zachary's strategies and tools for bringing people together to have deeper conversations about organizational learning will not only help sustain its mentoring efforts; they will help an organization revitalize its values and its focus on human development.