Leadership Mentoring Programme for Women: Framing Leader Identity through Dialoguing and Relating

Abstract

This paper restores the focus on the essence of human beings as fundamentally relational. It underlines a concern for genuine relatedness (Pope and Nicolaides, 2021) between mentee and mentor, as foundational to leader identity formation for women in a leadership mentoring programme. Expressions of the centrality of connection, the relational self, have been extended by feminist scholars, in particular, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Fletcher (2001) pointed to the “disappearing” of the very behaviour needed to be successful in the workplace. The capacity of human beings to connect and care, Gilligan (2014) argues, is lessened when living the values of patriarchy (Fishbane, 2023). Positioned at the intersection of mentoring at work (Kram, 1983, 1985/1988) and relational science (Berscheid, 1999), this multiperspectival qualitative study explored the research question: How do women mentees experience leadership mentoring in an Irish Higher Education context? Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, (IPA) underpinned by three major areas of the philosophy of knowledge, namely, phenomenology, hermeneutics and idiography, offered a pathway to illuminating the intersubjectivity between mentees and mentor within their dyads. The mentoring dyads comprised of women mentees who participated in a leadership mentoring programme and their matched mentors. Semi-structured interviews followed by three levels of analysis were conducted with mentees, mentors and the dyads. Energised by close attention to participant accounts, consistent with the principles of IPA, exploring the experience of participants in their own terms, required setting aside pre-existing assumptions and ideas (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2022). Conducting multiple iterations of analysis and interpretation, the findings underscored the importance of a focus on both the quality of the Developmental Relational Mentoring Space (DRMS) (Ganly, 2024) and the relational orientation within each dyad, for meaningful and effective mentoring experiences. This study developed the innovative DRMS construct to describe the relational dynamics in mentoring dyads, thus significantly enhancing insights into mentoring relationships. The DRMS is the mentoring space between mentee and mentor, co-created through dialogue influenced by both. A novel conceptual model, a feminist perspective, is presented emphasising the importance of intentionally attending to dialogue as a catalyst for reframing leader identity in mentoring dyads.