Resources / Books

Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring

Lean Forward, Learn, Leverage. This comprehensive guide to helping mentors and mentees bridge gaps between and among cultures—a growing issue in today’s diverse workplace—is coauthored by the founder and CEO of the Center for Mentoring Excellence.

As the workplace has become more diverse, mentoring has become more challenging. Mentors and mentees may come from very different backgrounds and have limited understanding of each other’s cultures and outlooks. But mentoring remains the most powerful tool for creating meaningful relationships, furthering professional development, and increasing engagement and retention. Younger workers and emerging leaders, in particular, are demanding it.

Lisa Z. Fain and Lois J. Zachary offer a timely, evidence-based, practical guide for helping mentors develop the level of cultural competency needed to bridge differences. Firmly rooted in Zachary’s well-known four-part mentoring model, the book uses three fictional scenarios featuring three pairs of diverse mentors and mentees to illustrate how key concepts can play out in real life. It offers an array of accessible tools and strategies designed to help you increase your self-awareness and prepare you to embrace and leverage differences in your mentoring relationships. But beyond tips and techniques, Fain and Zachary emphasize that authenticity is the key—the ultimate purpose of this book is to help the mentor and mentee make a genuine connection and learn from each other. That’s when the magic really happens.

“This book exposes one of mentoring’s biggest blind spots—mentors and mentees who assume similarity rather than difference—and provides insightful and practical advice for how to mentor and be mentored across all forms of diversity. A vital addition to the diversity and inclusion and mentoring field.” — Andrés T. Tapia, Senior Client Partner and Global Diversity and Inclusion Strategist, Korn Ferry, and author of The Inclusion Paradox

“Successful mentoring relationships must be authentic and inclusive. This practical hands-on guide to better mentoring by mentoring experts Fain and Zachary is not to be missed by anyone who wants to learn how to build deeper and more meaningful bridges across, under, and through difference.” — Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach for ten years and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Triggers, Mojo, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“Fain and Zachary, luminaries in the mentoring field, deliver the definitive applied toolbox for genuinely inclusive mentorship. Any leader committed to recruiting, retaining, and promoting diverse talent should personally hand a copy to every mentor and mentee in the organization.”— W. Brad Johnson, PhD, Professor of Psychology, US Naval Academy, and Faculty Associate, Johns Hopkins University

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