Role of Storytelling in the Mentoring Process

This paper addresses the question as to what sort of role storytelling plays in the formal mentoring process. Firstly, the individual’s personal competence which is divided into knowledge and socially based competencies, and how this competence alters in the course of the individual’s working life, is illustrated. Secondly, due to the fact that the mentor’s competence is transferred from his or her worldview to the mentee’s worldview, the concept of worldview is described. Then the discussion deals with the main content of the paper – namely mentoring and storytelling, and the characteristics of knowledge transferred through these activities. Due to the need to attain a better understanding of the knowledge transferred through mentoring and storytelling, some results of an empirical study conducted on a formal mentoring process in a large Finnish technological manufacturing company (i.e. comments of interviewees) are picked up in brief and included in the paper. The paper ends with the conclusion according to which knowledge transferred through the formal mentoring process differs from the knowledge transferred through an ordinary storytelling practice, and therefore the storytelling plays only a weak role in the mentoring. However, the situation depends upon the characteristics of both the mentor and mentee.