PREFACE

Welcome! You are about to begin an exciting and eye-opening process during which you will explore your own cultural lens, recognize the myriad of differences you and your mentoring partner bring to the table, and build skills you can use to bridge differences in your mentoring relationships.

Bridging Differences builds on coauthor Lois Zachary’s mentoring philosophy and four-phase mentoring model, and draws from many of her other mentoring publications.¹ Although she has devoted sections of each of her books to understanding difference (especially in The Mentor’s Guide), none have explored the topic of cultural competency in mentoring in depth. Coauthor Lisa Fain brings her expertise in coaching and cultural competency, and her passion for creating inclusive work environments to her role as CEO of the Center for Mentoring Excellence. Her work focuses on assisting companies to create more inclusive workplaces through mentoring by helping leaders to become more aware of their own cultural framework, to show up authentically, and to lead diverse teams that achieve better results.

Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring represents a marriage of the authors’ shared passions for mentoring and diversity and inclusion. It especially reflects our experiences with the hundreds of mentors and mentees and multinational clients we work with at the Center for Mentoring Excellence.

This Book Is for You

This book is, of course, for mentors and mentees, both novices and experts. It is also for learning and development professionals, and anyone involved in leading, supervising, or managing the mentoring and diversity process in an organization. We have designed the examples and framework to stimulate your thinking about mentoring relationships and to encourage you to reflect deeply on your experiences. In addition, we’ve included a variety of practical tips and suggestions to promote more culturally aware engagement, cultural competency, and authenticity—all essential for supporting positive productive partnerships and better mentoring.

If you are a mentoring program manager, a diversity and inclusion leader, a learning professional, or an organizational leader or talent manager, we invite you to use this book as a guide to grow your leaders’ cultural competency and elevate their mentoring practice. You will be better positioned to assist professionals engaged in mentoring management, coaching, troubleshooting, and developing internal communications about the mentoring program. Ultimately, regardless of your position in the organization, your understanding of cultural competency will benefit everyone. Learning how to communicate across differences will help you and your organization create a more inclusive workplace environment, bridge the gap between and among cultures, create cultural change, and make the most of your organization’s investment in mentoring.

How to Use This Book

Above all, begin at the beginning. As tempting as it may be to skip over things you think you already know about yourself, we have found that there are no shortcuts to building bridges for better mentoring. The chapters in this book are divided into three primary sections:

Part 1. Lean Forward into Differences: This section is about preparing yourself for mentoring. These chapters are designed to help you understand cultural competency and increase self-understanding and skill at seeing differences. The exercises included in this section will help you increase your self-awareness and prepare you to recognize, acknowledge, and bridge differences in your mentoring relationship.

Part 2. Learn from Differences: Once you have prepared yourself for mentoring, you are ready to prepare your relationship with your mentoring partner. We will guide you through ways to learn more about each other—your commonalities and differences, worldviews, goals for the future, and more—and how to negotiate your differences to communicate effectively.

Part 3. Leverage Differences: The chapters in this section explore establishing agreements with your mentoring partner, goal setting, and goal achievement. You and your mentoring partner can use the tools in this section to enhance your learning by setting up your relationship in a way that acknowledges your differences and customizes the learning and the growth in a way that meets your needs and adapts to your differences.

This is not a workbook, but it does provide space for reflection. It is not a textbook, but it does offer practice-based guidance built on theory. Readily accessible, understandable, and relatable tools, practical strategies, and fictional mentoring narratives illustrate how the key concepts we discuss can play out in real-life mentoring contexts. In each chapter you will find brief “Your Turn” exercises to help you articulate and apply the principles in this book. Use them to reflect individually, to stimulate conversation and exploration with your mentoring partner, and to deepen your conversation and understanding. “Chapter Recaps” summarize key learning points at the end of each chapter. Both the Your Turn exercises and the Chapter Recaps facilitate understanding and retention of the ideas and concepts presented in this book.

We hope that Bridging Differences will help you see yourself, your mentoring partners, and the many people who contribute to your organization in a new and deeper way.