Simmons Professor Releases Mentorship Video

Both people involved in a mentorship can benefit from the relationship, according to a new video from a professor of management at Simmons School of Management at Simmons College.

Simmons highlighted the motivational video on mentoring by Stacy Blake-Beard in a recent press release. The video appears on the website of Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

For the video, Blake-Beard draws on her research background on the topic of mentorship. According to her Simmons faculty bio, Blake-Beard examines “the challenges and opportunities offered by mentoring relationships, with a focus on how these relationships may be changing as a result of increasing workforce diversity. She is particularly interested in the issues women face as they develop mentoring relationships.”

“Mentoring is often seen as one person giving and the other person receiving,” Blake-Beard says in the video. “But I define mentoring as a dynamic, reciprocal relationship that is mutually beneficial, empowering and enabling.”

She goes on to discuss how we are often drawn to mentors who are similar to us on the surface level but that we can benefit when we look beyond the obvious to find mentors who share underlying similarities such as values and attitude — “the things that we don’t see but that are just as important.”

According to its website, the Clayman Institute “creates knowledge and seeks to implement change that promotes gender equality at Stanford, nationally, and internationally.”

At Simmons, Blake-Beard teaches graduate classes such as Leading Individuals and Groups. She has also published extensively on gender, diversity and mentoring and consulted for numerous large companies and organizations

 

Photo credit: #WOCinTech Chat

regions: Boston

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