The Tradition of Mentoring Part II: Leadership and Mentoring in the Culture of Healthcare

Leadership is a multifaceted construct. It requires mentoring as a lifelong experience. Leadership is not an isolated phenomenon, but an activity completely interrelated with those one leads. It can never be separated from its essential community or organizational context. This makes the experience of mentoring all the more critical. Adding yet to its complexity are the principles and responsibilities that leaders must develop continually over time. To ensure successful leadership, the experience of mentoring requires four important pedagogies for mutual engagement between mentors and the leaders they seek to serve and guide. The four signature pedagogies are those developed by the Carnegie Foundation: interpretation, contextualization, performance, and formation. Effective mentoring in the contemporary world of leadership inevitably requires a new paradigm for understanding and giving living expression to the individual growth and development that leaders and their organizations must experience with one another as communal partners. Such a series of new and evocative paradigms is all the more critical in healthcare communities where servant leadership and professional service touch the human person at the most vulnerable and critical junctures of life.