Learn how a mentor relationship can make your life more fulfilling
The Mentorship Edge: Creating Maximum Impact through Lateral and Hierarchical Mentoring explores how we connect to others, feel valued, get pleasure from life, and believe our lives have meaning through forming mentor relationships with others. This book covers traditional hierarchical mentorship we're all familiar with, along with lateral mentoring, where you connect with a friend or colleague - someone you can be vulnerable with - whether they work in your department, another department, or outside of your organization entirely.
Insight in this book is drawn from The International Association of Top Professionals 2025 Top CEO and Mentor of the Year Deborah Heiser's experience running The Mentor Project, a nonprofit mentoring organization with more than 100 mentors at the absolute top of their fields. In this book, readers will learn about:
- The proven benefits of mentorship in both work and home life
- Mentorship in various fields, including business, research, entrepreneurship, and art
- Classic examples of the power of mentorship, like when Steve Jobs asked Steve Wozniak for engineering help when he was at Atari
The Mentorship Edge is an essential guide to demystify the special concept of mentoring and inspire individuals to engage in mentoring naturally, whether hierarchically or laterally, based on their goals and passions.
Table of Contents
Introduction ix
1 We Are Built to Mentor 1
2 Five Key Components to Mentoring 17
3 What Mentoring Isn’t 27
4 Why We Mentor 45
5 Mentoring Styles 67
6 Mentors in Our Lives 87
7 Mentoring in the Workplace 109
8 Defining Mentoring through Research 141
9 The Future of Mentoring 157
10 Creating Culture through Mentorship 165
11 Call to Action: Finding Mentorship Opportunities 179
References 189
Acknowledgments 193
About the Author 195
Index 197
