10 Books That Will Make You a Better Mentor

We know you are on a quest to become a great mentor. We have curated a short list of books that will make you a better mentor. Happy reading!

1. Everyone Needs a Mentor: Fostering Talent at Work by David Clutterbuck

Mentoring is the most cost-efficient and sustainable method of fostering and developing talent within your organization. This book shows you what mentoring is and how it differs from coaching. It shows you how to make the business case for mentoring and then how to set up, run and maintain your mentoring program. It covers everything from selecting and matching mentors with mentees to how you measure the results. In short: mentoring works. This book tells you how.

2. The Art of Mentoring: Lead, Follow and Get Out of the Way by Shirley Peddy

The Art of Mentoring is rich with insights for those who mentor and those who benefit from that mentoring. Readers will discover that mentoring, more than transferring knowledge, is a reciprocal relationship between offering people advice and providing personal insights, support, and counsel to elevate their achievements and contributions.

3. Mentoring 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John Maxwell

What if you spent your entire life achieving but never shared your wisdom with anyone else?

Mentoring 101  gives you the bottom line of mentoring--what it is, why you should do it, and how you can do it most effectively. In this book, international leadership expert John C. Maxwell guides you in the art of mentoring by explaining how to choose the right person to mentor, to create the right environment for leaders to thrive and grow, how to help people become better, and how to overcome the most intimidating hurdle of all: getting started. Mentoring is the key to creating a lasting legacy, and Mentoring 101 is your personalized key to seeing that journey through.

4. Power Mentoring: How Successful Mentors and Proteges Get the Most Out of Their Relationships by Ellen Ensher and Susan Murphy

Written to reflect the realities of today’s business environment, Power Mentoring is a nuts-and-bolts guide for anyone who wants to create a connection with a mentor or to improve a current mentoring relationship. Filled with illustrative examples and candid insights from fifty of America's most successful mentors, Power Mentoring unlocks the secrets of great mentoring relationships and shows how anyone can become a successful mentor. The authors provide strategies for establishing such power mentoring relationships, outline the best practices, and offer insights from mentors in a variety of fields including technology, politics, and the media.

5. HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need by Harvard Business Review

Whether you’re eyeing a specific leadership role, hoping to advance your skills, or simply looking to broaden your professional network, you need to find someone who can help. Wait for a senior manager to come looking for you—and you’ll probably be waiting forever. Instead, you need to find the mentoring that will help you achieve your goals. Managed correctly, mentoring is a powerful and efficient tool for moving up. This guide will help you get it right. You’ll learn how to find new ways to stand out in your organization, set clear and realistic development goals, identify and build relationships with influential sponsors and many more.

6. Helping People Change: Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth by Richard Boyatzis 

The way to help someone learn and change, they say, cannot be focused primarily on fixing problems, but instead must connect to that person's positive vision of themselves or an inspiring dream or goal they've long held. This is what great coaches do--they know that people draw energy from their visions and dreams, and that same energy sustains their efforts to change, even through difficult times. This book uses rich and moving real-life stories, as well as decades of original research, to show how this distinctively positive mode of coaching―what they call "coaching with compassion"--opens people up to thinking creatively and helps them to learn and grow in meaningful and sustainable ways. Helping People Change will forever alter the way all of us think about and practice what we do when we try to help.

7. I'm OK – You're OK by Thomas A. Harris, MD

This is a self-help book about a psychotherapy breakthrough called Transactional Analysis, by which Thomas Harris teaches you to analyse the mind of the human being and then use that knowledge appropriately to really understand transactions between people and how to respond to them. The human being is split up into three people: Parent, Adult, and Child. Ideally, one should consciously try to bring out your Adult and use it to discipline the negative feelings about yourself, which originate from both the Parent and the Child. When mentoring another, sometimes we move to the Parent role our mentee settles in that of the Child. This book is a great guide to help you set kind boundaries. 

8. The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by By Michael Bungay Stanier

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your people's potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how--by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

9. Change Your Questions, Change Your Life by Marilee G. Adam

What questions lead to our biggest breakthroughs and successes? This book describes how questions shape our thinking and how personal and organizational problems can often be traced to the kinds of questions we ask. The book illustrates how to quickly recognize any undermining questions that pop into your mind--or out of your mouth—and reframe them to achieve amazingly positive and practical results. It shows the ways to achieve more effective communication, greater collaboration, and highly effective solutions to problems in any situation. 

10. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink

Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. In When, Pink distils cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.  This great book also will guide your “When” moments in your mentoring journey!  

We hope these pointers were helpful for you. Remember, you have your own style and way to share your experiences. And you rock in doing so! 

If you would like to read up on more suggestions and pointers, you can read our MentorWIN Program Guide.   Happy Reading! 

You can join the TurkishWIN Mentoring program by joining us as a member. Our membership application is online at this link. Our dues are annual and you can join us any time based on a 12-month  rolling subscription. We cannot wait to meet you!