The Potential of Adaptive Mentorship © : Experts’ Perspectives

Abstract

In recent years, global interest in the processes of mentorship and coaching has expanded across all disciplinary fields. Educational institutions, commercial enterprises, and other organizations have integrated mentorship processes into their educational programs to help prepare/train protégés for entry into a specific professions or occupations and/or to upgrade their related skills/knowledge. Over the past quarter century, in partial response to the popularity of mentoring, the authors have developed a mentoring model called Adaptive Mentorship© (AM). Research conducted by the authors and others has affirmed AM’s value in improving mentoring practice in a variety of disciplines. In the present article, the authors summarize assessments of the model that they solicited during the past five years from 49 multi-disciplinary groups or panels of experts. The experts’ positive statements regarding AM outweighed their cautionary comments by a ratio of 2:1. The strengths that they identified were that AM conceptualized the entire mentorship process in an understandable manner, and that it helped reveal potential interpersonal conflicts as well as practical solutions for them. The caveats identified by the experts were that personnel employing the AM model must apply it sensibly, sensitively, and flexibly—especially in cross-cultural contexts.