Blog 11-It's a doozy.

This was a mistake: it's for chapter 15. But I think it's still worth reading, friends!

Yikes! This chapter was dense. I finally connected to the information when Brown started talking about the importance of mentoring. As I’ve said in previous posts, I think it is beyond crucial that the career client be motivated to be counseled in his or her career choices. Some extravagant company attempts to motivate or teach employees don’t seem feasible to me because the supposed beneficiary of the counseling isn’t seeking it out.

                Brown begins to discuss mentoring between coworkers on page 342 and points out that, as a tactic in career development, it has received the most attention. To me this seems doable because a “junior member” will feel the rapport with his or her mentor and trust that the feedback the mentor is giving is constructive and not critical. It was interesting how Brown pointed out that the mentor will also benefit from the relationship because they feel that they are being helpful and a part of something (Brown, 2012, pg. 343). This sat weird with me when I tried to think about it, because I couldn’t see if that was obvious or counterintuitive. People volunteer for organizations all the time (Big Brothers, Big Sisters; nursing homes, soup kitchens—to name the cliché ones) simply for the good feeling they get from it, but is that really it? Or are they doing it so they can tell people that they volunteered just for the good of the cause? I am wondering if these “senior members” are benefiting from mentoring because they are building a friendship and feeling good about being a role model, or if they are doing it so their higher ups see the extra work they are doing.

It was worth getting through the whole chapter just to read the section about mentors because it is truly scandalous! When reading Brown’s version of Kram’s concerns about cross-gender mentoring, I felt like I was watching an episode of the Newsroom. I know in situations like the ones that were laid out (i.e. coworkers think the mentor/mentee are sleeping together, etc.) people tend to say something cliché and vague like “I thought we left high school behind. . .” but I’m going to go out on a limb here and beg the question that relates to the chapter we read on disabilities: are women really held back in business because they are women? Or because everyone is constantly trying to figure out which male boss they have their eyes on? What I’m saying might sound silly and trivial, but I am having such a hard time coming to terms with the fact that these “concerns” about cross-gender mentoring relationships are bulleted in a textbook that we are learning from! I’m not saying it’s bogus, just shocking that we are learning in an academic world that would have us take notes on the five ways that a man mentoring a woman in the workplace may cause problems—and they all are concerning sex or sexism.

Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development(10^th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education, Inc.