MENTORING PARTNERS

To promote a mutual partnership, AHRD is opting for a relational mentoring model where participating faculty/advanced doctoral student/post-doctoral scholar will be mentoring partners to each other (Ghosh, Hutchins, Rose, & Manongsong, 2020; Ragins & Verbos, 2007; Ragins, 2011). In other words, both parties in the mentoring relationship can be mentors and/or mentees depending on their developmental needs. Rotating the mentor/mentee roles between each other will enable them to reciprocate each other's learning.

For example, a junior HRD faculty can be a mentee when he/she is learning from a senior or a mid-career HRD faculty (enacting a mentor's role) about how to publish in HRD journals. The same junior HRD faculty can mentor the mid-career/senior HRD faculty on a new topical area that is gaining traction in HRD research in recent years (e.g., engagement, incivility etc.).

This model emphasizes two-way learning characterizing high-quality developmental relationships and challenges the traditional notion that views mentoring as a top-down hierarchical relationship where one who is relatively senior in the relationship typically assumes the mentor's role (Ghosh, Reio, & Haynes, 2012).

VOLUNTARY INPUT IN MATCHING

The participating faculty will be allowed to choose their top 3 preferred mentoring partners from the list of all participants in this program. So, for example, if 10 faculty participants have enrolled, each faculty will be asked to choose 3 mentoring partners from the list of 9 participants for themselves.

Each faculty participant will complete a "Mentoring Partner choice Form" where they will need to justify their choice by explaining why their chosen mentoring partners are best suited/prepared to meet their developmental needs and how they are best suited to meet their chosen partners' developmental needs. Developmental needs of all participating faculty will be made available to inform these choices.

Once each participating faculty has indicated their 3 preferred mentoring partners, the Mentoring Program team will facilitate the pairing/matching by ensuring that they are paired with one of their 3 preferred mentoring partners.

Seeking voluntary input into matching/pairing will help to build ownership of the mentoring partnerships among the participants (Allen, Eby, & Lentz, 2006; Hegstad & Wentling, 2004).

DEVELOPMENTAL NETWORK APPROACH

The participating faculty need to remember that the mentoring partnership they will develop in this program will be ONE developmental relationship among many they can establish for their professional and personal growth.

So, this program is not promising to meet all of their developmental needs as it is not possible for one mentoring partner to meet all developmental needs (Dobrow, Chandler, Murphy, & Kram, 2012; Higgins & Kram, 2001).

It is to provide an “in-discipline” resource that helps each support the development needs of each partner. Each faculty will be encouraged to consider their mentoring partnership as a valuable resource in their developmental network which will include other developmental relationships inside or outside the AHRD.