Susan Elaine Murphy, associate professor of psychology and associate director of the Kravis Leadership Institute, will present a workshop in South Africa in August, based on her recent book, Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships. Written with co-author Ellen Ensher, the book provides an in-depth examination of the challenges to, and benefits from, effective relationships between mentors and protégés.
"Mentoring is a tool by which lessons of effective leadership are passed on to the next generation of leaders," says Murphy. "Many leadership development experts consider the support of mentors as a key component to effective development. Mentors can coach protégés on appropriate leadership behaviors, effective career decisions, and ways for navigating explosive organization politics."
The workshop in South Africa will focus on providing human resources managers and business leaders the tools they need to set up their own mentoring program. Led by Murphy and Ensher, participants will develop a step-by-step guide for establishing, monitoring, and sustaining a mentoring system. To specifically address the interests of local organizers in South Africa, the workshop will emphasize issues of cross-cultural mentoring. This is targeted to support a variety of initiatives, including Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which are important to local business leaders.
Drawing on the findings of Power Mentoring, the workshop will share the secrets of highly successful mentors and protégés as revealed in the interviews of 50 top leaders and their protégés in technology, politics, and the media. While mentoring has been essential to the development of influential leaders in a variety of organizations, these interviews showed that it also more nuanced and complex than some might suspect.
"What do high-level executive such as Bob Wright, chairman and CEO of NBC and Vivendi Universal and Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC Television Group, look for when choosing a protégé? What can high-level mentors gain from mentoring others? Those were a few of the basic questions we considered in conducting the interviews for the book," says Murphy. Among other findings, Murphy and Ensher discovered that highly successful protégés cultivate a variety of mentors in a network for support and advice, thus the term, "power mentoring."
The book continues Murphy's interest in the study of mentoring, which began when she first began teaching at CMC and developed the Kravis Mentoring Program. This program included CMC's first service-learning course, encouraging students to learn while giving back to their community. "Our CMC students learn about adolescent development, the psychology of relationship development, and mentoring as a tool for helping young people," says Murphy.
"They also learn about the importance of mentoring in organizations to train and develop the next generation of leaders."
Susan Murphy has authored or co-authored several dozen articles on topics including leadership, organizational culture, and mentoring. She has edited four books, including The Quest for Moral Leaders: Essays in Leadership Ethics (Edward Elgar, 2005), and The Future of Leadership Development (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003). She is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she also earned her MBA and master's and Ph.D. in organizational psychology.