Crucial Mentoring Conversations: Guide and Leading

Mentoring nourishes others to grow and act with greater confidence. The need for mentorship is greater than ever before. However, informal mentoring has not kept up with the challenges in business. In his latest book on mentoring, Niël Steinmann, South Africa's leading authority on mentorship suggests a structured and intentional approach to mentoring, called crucial mentoring conversations. He explains: 'Our success in life is dictated by the quality of relationships we can build and maintain'. Parents, teachers and leaders from any career, professional, or educational setting are now challenged to successfully navigate mentoring relationships.

The book is rich with advice and will explore the various conversations crucial for mentoring relationships. You will be able to hold deeper more honest conversations that create new levels of self-awareness and opportunities for those that you mentor to transform situations and relationships around them. It presents to the mentor practical tools to facilitate this awareness and learning in ways that enrich, challenge, inspire and enable mentees to learn about themselves and their world.

When you mentor intentionally, opportunities for crucial conversations present themselves all the time - from 'What's my purpose?' to navigating career challenges, to performance feedback, developing strengths and how to manage productive relationships and networks both personally and professionally.

Niël Steinmann is a specialist business consultant and registered Industrial Psychologist. He has invested more than a quarter century studying the topics of mentoring, coaching and leadership development. In 1999 he founded People's Dynamic Development, a management consultancy that utilizes African analogies to develop people and organisations to significantly increase their performance capacity. Niël is the author of Fundamentals for effective mentoring: Raising giant killers which received international recognition and endorsements from prominent and renowned leadership consultant Dr Ken Blanchard.