The Pros & Cons of Professionalising Mentoring

On Thursday 14th February, a lively and  rigorous debate on the professionalization of mentoring was held at Sheffield Hallam University. Professor Bob Garvey began the debate with a provocation as whether professionalization of mentoring was synonym for attempts to control a  wide ranging and  emancipatory social movement. In response, Dr Paul Stokes challenged the notion that professionalization is necessarily the same as control, whilst Professor David Clutterbuck raised the question of the extent to which professional mentoring engenders wisdom. Expanding on this theme, Professor Clutterbuck cited a number of examples of programmes that developed participants as mentors and questioned their efficacy in doing so. He argued that, in his view, across the world, quite a sizeable proportion of so- called professional mentors did not necessarily operate professionally. Dr Paul Stokes challenged the notion that this was on such a wide scale but accepted the principle that doing an accredited development programme for mentors did not guarantee professional mentoring behaviour. He explored the notion that effective mentor development programmes should account for the diversity of the movement, should ensure that ethical mentoring practice is examined and, most critically, that professional mentors should be encouraged to leverage their own personal experience in service of the mentee’s development. A number of other issues and debates were raised by audience members in a wide ranging debate which covered issues such as:

 

  • The role that the EMCC as a professional body should play in developing ethical mentoring behaviour
  • Whether there was a need for a regulatory body, like in teaching (OFSTED) which should sit alongside professional bodies
  • Differences between coaching & mentoring in terms of where they were on the professionalization journey
  • Critique of the role that government bodies and agencies play in developing mentoring within wider society

 

The debate raised a whole new series of useful questions as to what role various stakeholders – i.e. individuals, professional bodies like EMCC, government and universities should play – in professionalising mentoring behaviours.