Traditional mentorship programs tend to be organized via a hierarchy, with mentees being assigned a mentor to advance mentees’ careers. Under imprecise rubrics like “peer mentoring” or “lateral mentoring,” recent attention has focused on how key mentorships happen outside of institutional programs. Deborah Heiser started an organization called The Mentor Project to promote relationships with mentees that grow out of an accomplished veteran’s innate desire to give back. In The Mentorship Edge, she proposes that organizations best enable mentoring relationships by facilitating connections rather than by focusing on career advancement.

Like other books about mentoring, this book is filled with stories about unique ways this group’s mentees and mentors have connected. Mentorship books seem to collect stories of mentors going the extra mile to help a mentee. That’s the fun part because these noteworthy aspects seem to be the norm in healthy mentoring relationships. We all want to go the extra mile to help someone taste success.

Two sections stood out to me in this book. First, as a researcher centered in psychology, she grounds mentorship in Erik Erikson’s leading theory of adult development in her introduction. There’s a lot to his theory, but his description of a later life phase of “generativity” overlaps with mentorship. Wanting to give back through socially meaningful activities is a completely normal part of being an adult. We all do it, and we don’t need to don a superhero cape to mentor. Heiser captures this generative impulse that we all possess to describe what mentorship should be about. I appreciate the philosophical grounding of mentorship as a universal human need.

Second, the chapter on Mentoring in the Workplace caught my interest. Individual stories of healthy relationships certainly move me, but I’m interested in learning how mentorship scales in different industries. Through true-to-life narratives, she breaks down how mentoring can work in industries as different as healthcare, the military, and the law. She demonstrates how a lateral generativity can help even in the most vertical of environments.

By way of critique, I dislike her use of the term “lateral mentoring.” First, she puts a trademark sign every time she uses it. This unconventional branding distracts from the main message of the book. Most technical terms do not use a trademark, especially in a scientific environment. It speaks of capitalism, not scientific collegiality. Second, she tries to distinguish it from “peer mentoring” by claiming that peer mentoring is more emotional. In the field of biomedical research, this claim is untrue. Peer mentoring in the literature refers to what she refers to as lateral mentoring. Instead of acknowledging different uses, she tries to steer us to her trademarked term. This use raises my cynicism.

Nonetheless, this book paints a picture of how mentoring relationships can abound around us, and how naturally they can form (or something related to the “generativity” idea). While this book contains limited quantitative data, abundant qualitative stories illustrate her key observation that mentoring relationships stem from the mentor’s human need for generativity. I appreciate that her vision for mentorship is not limited to a fixed, hierarchical program but a culture of human relationships where we all help one another. In my experience, the best mentoring relationships are unplanned but grounded in human care.

About the Author

Screen Name

Scott Pearson

About Me

I write computer code that analyzes academic career development, particularly with Flight Tracker. I like doing cool things with data and watching others do cool things with data. In my spare time, I read a lot of books about a lot of things, spend time in my garden, and hang out with my family (wife, daughter, and cat).