Mentoring in knowledge management for development

Authors

  • Stuart Belle Personal Effectiveness and Organization Development Professional

Keywords:

knowledge management, mentoring, human resource development, organizational learning

Abstract

Mentoring can serve as a valuable professional enhancement resource for knowledge management practitioners, particularly for those who are early career and serving in developing country contexts. Opportunities for these individuals to connect with and learn from mentors remains overlooked and under-documented, however. In this piece, I reflect on my own experience as a mentor as I filled roles guiding knowledge management and organizational learning internationally. The article opens with a reflection on my discovery of what was needed to robustly support the knowledge management function, and the call to mentor in this same vein. The essence of mentoring is described, and broadly compared to training and coaching interventions. I share lessons learned and highlights of take-aways for organizations and those who wish to strengthen knowledge management capacity. I close my reflection by concluding that mentoring is important for nurturing a professional sense of belonging and unveiling the beauty of empathy.

References

Belle, S. M (2015) ?Knowledge stewardship as an ethos-driven approach to business ethics?, Journal of Business Ethics 142(1), 83-91

Belle, S (2016) ?Organizational learning? Look again?, The Learning Organization 23(5), 332-341

Haeckel, S. H. (1999) Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-and-Respond Organizations, President and Fellows of Harvard College

Maitlis, S and Christianson, M (2014) ?Sensemaking in organizations: taking stock and moving forward?, The Academy of Management Annals 8(1), 57-125

Senge, P M (2003) ?Creating desired futures in a global economy?, Reflections 5(1), 1-12

Sonenshein, S (2010) ?We?re changing ? or are we? Untangling the role of progressive, regressive, and stability narratives during strategic change implementation? Academy of Management Journal 53(3), 477-512

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Published

2020-09-11

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2020): Challenges and opportunities in measuring knowledge management results and development impact (Part 2)

Section

Reflections

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Stuart Belle

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The copyright of the articles published in this journal remains the property of the authors. For liability reasons, the title belongs to the Foundation for the Support of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. This journal is currently an open access journal as it has a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles." However, some of the content (2009-2012) is only available on the Taylor and Francis website. Within the next few months, this issue too will become available on the OJS. [1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess