How can lifelong mentoring help to develop leaders?

"We all, from time to time, find ourselves in the role of mentoring and being mentored," said Dr. Barbara Curry, a professor in the college of human services, education and public policy at the University of Delaware. "Mentoring is common, organic and often intuitive."

Rather than being a finite experience that stops at some point in an adult's development, mentoring occurs throughout our lifetimes, Curry said. "The village raising the child continues to raise the adults. We're social beings. We are reading and interpreting people's experiences all the time."

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Seeking feedback, Curry spoke about her research at the Women in Educational Leadership conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in September.

A faculty member in the school of education, Curry does research in educational administration and is experienced in training leaders. Seeking nontraditional ways to combine the two, she is currently researching how the clinical aspects of adult identity development apply as individuals develop into leaders.

Curry is trying to link Erik Erickson's theory of social development to the mentoring experience. Erickson's "Eight Stages of Man" states that the social environment combined with physical maturation provides each individual with a set of "crises" that they must resolve in a given period of time before another one appears. The resolution, successful or unsuccessful, is carried forward and provides the foundation for resolving the next crisis.

Using this paradigm, Curry's objective is to learn what types of mentoring will produce leaders. "We have first mentors who prime us to take on and participate in mentoring relationships," she said. When we move into adulthood, who, if anyone, replaces them?