Professional Career Development: A Case Study

Professional Career Development

As stated by Hawkins & Smith (2013) it is significant to not only understand career and development transitions but how these can be best supported by mentors. There are three common stages of mentoring people through transition process:

The first stage, unlearning, is when the mentee begins to encounter the limits of their current way of being. They find themselves in a role or situation in which their past ways of operating no longer work so well for them. For some, this is a time of frustration and loss of confidence, for having been previously very successful they now start to receive negative feedback. Others cling desperately to their old skills and habits. The task of the mentor is to support their mentee

This is the stage when the mentee starts to incorporate new ways of thinking, behaving and acting and make them both sustainable in their own. Recognition and appreciation of what has been established from the mentor is often most useful at this stage.

As discussed by Hawkins and Smith (2013) Torbert suggests seven definable stages of leadership development. Torbet emphasizes how important it is for a leader to understand his or her own action logic and then explore how he or she can change it. (1) The opportunist focused upon personal wins and other people as opportunities to be exploited. Opportunist have a strong need to be in control and treat other people as competitor, who are seen to also operate with the same view of the world. Opportunist mistrust others, manipulative and ruthless of action.

The conventional action logics take social categories, norms and power structures for granted as constituting the very nature of a stable reality. The (2) diplomat (3), expert and (4)

This is the most commonly observed and practiced action logic transition among business people and those in management and executive education. It is also the one most successfully addressed at present. The major development tailback in organization is in transforming those who have had expert success in their field, and who have on this basis been promoted into managerial and leadership responsibilities that tear them away from work they love. Mentors need to help those in this transition, to move their dominant focus from current problem resolution to focus on future goals and how to achieve