Understanding E-Mentoring in Organizations

In the 1998 hit film, You've Got Mail, during a time when most of the U.S. was still just discovering the ways in which email was transforming their lives, Meg Ryan's character, Kathleen Kelly, writes to her then-anonymous email correspondent: "The odd thing about this form of communication is that you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say, that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings. So, thanks." What Kathleen Kelly was trying to describe are the facets of email that have made it particularly helpful in building relationships online, even between individuals who may never have met in person. Even before the Worldwide Web burst open globally in the mid-1990s, forever changing information, commerce, and communications across the world, social scientists had taken note of the ways in which emerging forms of electronic communications had created strong bonds between individuals (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Now, as new forms of electronic communication have emerged with increasing speed in recent years, opportunities for online learning, including mentoring, have taken on many new dimensions. Mentoring relationships now almost always extend beyond traditional face-to-face mentoring, and mentoring programs supported by technological advances have developed in number and in sophistication. In trying to make best use of the new technologies, and investing time and resources wisely in building infrastructure for mentoring, it is helpful to have a framework to know how and under what circumstances to employ online mentoring effectively to accomplish the mentoring objectives for organizations and individuals. What is E-mentoring? From the learner's perspective, let's start with a definition of "e-mentoring." This is also sometimes called "telementoring," "cyber-mentoring," "virtual mentoring," or even "iMentoring," most typically describes a mentoring relationship which uses the tools of electronic communications either to extend and enhance an existing mentoring relationship, or to create one where it would not otherwise exist. Because of the potential benefits of mentoring relationships, it is not surprising that people would leap at the opportunity to expand mentoring relationships to many more individuals. Since the most common reason structured mentoring relationships fail is the inability of mentors and their proteges to meet due to constraints of time and location (Wunsch, 1994), the use of email in support of mentoring is an obvious possible solution, offering a highly efficient means of communication, not dependent on participants' location, and avoiding the necessity of schedule congruence. Technology-based solutions, including use of email, have also been particularly attractive for mentoring program developers. Those experienced with implementing mentoring programs know all too well that for many mentoring pairs, participants need frequent reminders from and communications with the program developer to persist in developing a solid and useful mentoring relationship (Boyle & Boice, 1998; Char, 1997; Rhodes, 2002). Thus, there is hope that technology could more efficiently support this provision of ongoing coaching and training for program participants (Single & Muller, 2001). In general discussions of "e-mentoring," what is sometimes hot separated sufficiently are two distinct aspects of "e-mentoring" programs: (a) the use of email, or other electronic communications in connecting mentors and proteges, and (b) the technological "platform" developed for such a purpose--a set of systems based on the information technology afforded by web pages associated with interrelated databases, email, and scripts designed to enhance communications between participants and the program structure, which also may have embedded matching algorithms in order to match mentors and proteges quickly and efficiently (Muller, 1998). …