Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Protégés Get the Most Out of Their Relationships

Many of the world's most successful people (Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, for example) credit mentoring as a major factor in their achievements. Research shows that mentoring can be a very effective way to advance one's career and improve one's knowledge and skills. But the traditional models of mentoring have failed to keep up with trends in the business world - programs based on career longevity with one organization no longer mesh with what's really happening. Individuals need to be proactive in creating mentor-protégée relationships, establishing networks of multiple relationships across organizations and industries. The authors provide strategies for establishing such "Power Mentoring" relationships, and support their concept through interviews with 50 top leaders and their rising-star protégées in technology, politics, and the media, including:

• Bob Wright, vice chairman of GE and CEO of NBC
• Gen. Lee Butler, former commander of US nuclear forces
• Rosario Marin, US treasurer
• Leeza Gibbons, producer and Emmy-winning TV personality
• Larry Carter, senior VP and CFO of Cisco Systems
• Martha Coolidge, Emmy-nominated director and president of the Director's Guild
• Congresspeople Ron Dellums, David Dreier, and Hilda Solis
• Nick Donofrio, senior VP of technology & manufacturing at IBM
• Ron Meyer, president and COO of Universal Studios

About the Authors

Ellen A. Ensher, PH.D., is an associate professor of management at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Ensher earned her master’s degree in public administration at the University of Southern California in 1990 and completed her doctorate in organizational psychology at Claremont Graduate University in 1997.

Dr. Ensher currently teaches human resource management and related courses, including employee and labor relations, organizational development, and training and development. She has been consistently evaluated by her students as being in the top 5 percent of business professors at LMU.

Dr. Ensher has published 25 articles and book chapters and made more than 70 professional presentations. She has published in journals including Academy of Management Executive, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Journal of Career Development, Journal of Vocational Behavior, and Organizational Dynamics.

Susan Elaine Murphy, PH.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College and the associate director of the Henry R. Kravis Leadership Institute in Claremont, California. Dr. Murphy earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Washington in organizational psychology, where she also earned an MBA in the School of Business. Dr. Murphy currently teaches in organizational psychology and organizational development and is also an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University, where she teaches courses in industrial psychology and teams and leaders.

She has published more than 25 articles and book chapters on leadership, leadership development, and mentoring. Her current works include two edited books, The Future of Leadership Development (with Ron Riggio) and Work-Family Balance to Work-Family Interaction: Changing the Metaphor (with Diane Halpern). Susan is actively involved in the development, delivery, and evaluation of youth mentoring programs in the Los Angeles area, both through her service-learning college course on mentoring, and her evaluation of youth-based mentoring programs, including TeamWorks. These efforts provide mentoring to hundreds of students. Her other area of research looks at leadership effectiveness and the application of education to leaders at the high school, undergraduate, and adult levels. She has recently published two studies on the importance of charismatic leadership in increasing group motivation. Susan was recently honored to be chosen, because of her background in and dedication to mentoring, to be a Posse Foundation mentor to incoming Claremont McKenna College students. She previously worked for Battelle as a research scientist, consulting in the areas of leadership and management education, as well as organizational change, for clients in the United States and Japan. She continues designing and delivering leadership development programs as well as other organizational development activities for organizations such as Toyota Motor Sales, RGL Gallagher, Bain & Co., the Los Angeles City Fire Department, and the City of Claremont. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband Copil Yáñez.

In addition to their work on power mentoring, Professors Ensher and Murphy have several other ongoing research studies and writing projects. They are currently working on a project that uncovers the management secrets of film and television directors. In interviews with 25 directors, they uncover the nature of leadership from the director’s chair. This work was presented at the 2004 Academy of Management meeting in New Orleans. In 2003, Professors Murphy and Ensher presented at the National Summit for Youth Mentoring Research. They also accepted an invitation to contribute to a leading scholar’s handbook of mentoring, The Handbook of Mentoring (to be published in 2007).