It Takes a Village: the Case for Distributed and Agile Mentoring

• Publication year: 2023
• Pages: 10

52 Colo.law. 10 It Takes a Village: The Case for Distributed and Agile Mentoring Vol. 52, No. 1 [Page 10] Colorado Lawyer February, 2023

January, 2023

Mentoring Matters

BY J. RYANN PEYTON

Mentoring brings together the best of what professional development has to offer: trusted personal relationships where practical and interpersonal skills are built and refined. 'The sharing and transfer of knowledge through camaraderie is one of the most effective forms of learning.

Unfortunately, finding a suitable mentor is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Overcrowded networking events might give way to a coffee meeting or two, but the odds of a true mentoring relationship developing from these types of surface-level exchanges are slim to none. Traditional networking provides exposure, but most young lawyers and law students will never find a mentor this way. And in any case, one mentor isn't enough to really send a mentee on a successful professional pathway. Modern mentoring recognizes that it takes a village to raise a lawyer.

Two emerging mentoring concepts that fully embrace this realization are distributed mentoring and agile mentoring. Both of these concepts eschew traditional networking and instead help new lawyers connect with a village of mentors through small-group mentoring and efficient communication mechanisms.

What is Distributed Mentoring?

Distributed mentoring is rooted in the concept of co-mentoring. Unlike traditional mentoring, co-mentoring does not assume the mentor has superior knowledge or experience.^[1] Instead, co-mentoring colleagues work in "thought partnerships" to support and extend each other's professional development.

Co-mentoring has progressed into the broader concept of distributed mentoring. One of the core principles of distributed mentorship is that you are on an ever-evolving j ourney that requires guidance from direct engagement with many people and many sources of information.^[2] Thus, the main distinction between co-mentoring and distributed mentoring is that co-mentoring relies on human capital as the sole source of mentorship, while distributed mentoring encourages mentees to draw from a variety of information sources in addition to human capital.

The idea that mentoring can occur through such varied sources as literature, technology, podcasts, online content, and co-mentoring is relatively new to a profession steeped in traditional learning methods, but a modern and diverse...