Becoming an Effective Mentoring Leader: Proven Strategies for Building Excellence in Your Organization

CHAPTER 4MENTORING: THE STORY

“Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.”

—Samuel Butler, eighteenth-century English writer

The Story Analogy

In the first part of the book, you learned about the fundamentals of mentoring, which means you already know what you’re supposed to do.

The next part is all about how to do what you’re supposed to do. But before we get into the how-to, it’s good for you to have a sense of how the relationship should unfold. We devote this chapter to doing just that.

Note that we used the word should and not must. It’s a suggestion, not a commandment. The mentor must, however, maintain appropriate flexibility in any and every mentoring relationship, because every relationship is dynamic ...