Emotional Intelligence and Positive Psychology within a Mentoring Ecosystemi

Bob Garvey
Workshops Overview

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is now recognised as a strategic organisational capability, central to leadership, talent development, engagement and retention. In modern workplaces, EI sits alongside technical and cognitive skills as essential for resilience, collaboration and performance.

Mentoring is increasingly positioned as a powerful way to develop EI at scale, moving beyond traditional one-to-one models towards mentoring ecosystems that include peer, group, reverse, situational and reciprocal mentoring. These approaches are especially valuable for developing empathy, emotional awareness and self-regulation. For Gen Z and Higher Education contexts, EI is particularly important in managing stress linked to societal pressures, AI, automation and hybrid working. Strong EI supports confidence, resilient relationships and reduced burnout.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Explain how mentoring ecosystems support EI development
• Practise emotionally intelligent mentoring behaviours
• Design mentoring approaches that balance digital tools and human connection

The workshop will use mentoring case studies, practical activities and digital approaches to explore how mentors develop their own EI and support mentees’ EI development within wider developmental networks

Designing, Managing, and Evaluating Mentoring Programs

Laura Lunsford
Campbell University 

Mentoring program managers are being asked to do more with less, more participants, more data, more reporting, fewer hours. AI tools can help, but only if you know where to apply them and where to be cautious.

This workshop integrates a proven five-step program design framework with a critical, hands-on examination of AI applications, from goal-setting and matching to data collection and stakeholder reporting.

The morning session builds your program's foundation: defining purpose, mapping theory of change, and recruiting and preparing participants. You will stress-test your program against international quality standards and identify where AI creates genuine efficiency.

The afternoon Comparison Lab puts that analysis to work. Small teams tackle identical program management tasks across different AI platforms, then debrief: Where did the tools help? Where did they hallucinate or introduce bias? What should never be delegated to an algorithm?

You leave with a decision framework, practical workflows, and clearer judgment about responsible AI adoption in your program context.

No technical background required, only a willingness to experiment.

Learning outcomes

• Clarify program goals that drive design and evaluation.
• Critically evaluate AI outputs against quality standards.
• Apply responsible AI workflows to your highest-burden program management tasks.

Designing Mentoring Ecosystems Employing the Science of Positive Communities

Peter Mather
Ohio University   

How can organizations move past traditional mentoring models to create a holistic culture of development? This plenary session bridges the gap between individual growth and organizational process by exploring the science of positive work environments. By synthesizing positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and Sharon Parks' concept of mentoring communities, this session will explore how to build ecosystems where people feel seen, supported, and energized. Applicable to a variety of environments, this session provides a framework for embedding developmental practices into organizational infrastructure. Attendees will gain systemic strategies to unlock collective potential, improve retention, and foster high-quality relationships that empower individuals to navigate their life and career paths successfully.

Human-at-the-Helm: Using AI to Support Not Replace Mentors.

Jean E. Rhodes
University of Massachusetts Boston   

Colleges and universities are turning to generative AI chatbots to cope with rising demand for advising, mental health, and student services. Although these tools can improve short term efficiency, they also risk weakening the very relationships that support healthy development during the college years. This session, based on the article Human at the Helm Redefining the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Student Support, examines how student facing chatbots can intensify vulnerabilities, disrupt identity formation, and limit access to social capital, particularly for less advantaged students. I then introduce a human at the helm model in which AI is used behind the scenes to aggregate data, surface evidence based strategies, and reduce administrative burden while human mentors remain the primary relational agents. This approach preserves the developmental benefits of mentoring while still addressing institutional capacity constraints.

Head, Heart, and Gut: The Biology of Transformative Mentoring

Imandeep Grewal & Johnetta Ricks
Eastern Michigan University 

What if building effective mentorship ecosystems requires us to understand not just what mentors do, but what happens inside the body when transformation becomes possible? This plenary presents an original neuroscientific and cross-cultural framework organized around three interconnected centers of intelligence: the cephalic (head), cardiac (heart), and enteric (gut) brain systems. Drawing on polyvagal theory, cardiac neurology, and enteric nervous system research alongside Sikh, African, and indigenous wisdom traditions, the session demonstrates a central argument: what wisdom traditions have always known about the integration of mind, spirit, and body, contemporary science is now confirming. These are convergences rather than analogies. Grounded in Amartya Sen’s capability approach, every human being’s right and capability to live a life they value and have reason to value, the framework shows how mentorship ecosystems can be designed to activate the biological and relational conditions in which mentee aspirations expand. Participants will leave with a conceptually grounded framework, practical somatic tools, and a new vocabulary for building mentoring relationships and systems that are scientifically informed, culturally expansive, and genuinely developmental.

Building Mentorship Systems That Last: Lessons from 15 Years of Mentoring Boys and Young Males

Victor B. Sáenz
University of Texas at Austin 

What does it take to build mentoring initiatives that not only succeed, but endure? Drawing on 15 years of experience leading Project MALES, a university-community partnership dedicated to supporting boys and young men of color, this plenary explores lessons learned from building and sustaining mentoring ecosystems rooted in developmental relationships and critical mentoring.

While mentoring is often understood through the lens of individual mentor-mentee relationships, lasting impact depends on the organizational partnerships, institutional commitments, and community connections that make those relationships possible. This presentation examines how long-term collaborations among universities, K–12 schools, community organizations, and near-peer mentors have created opportunities for youth development, educational success, and community engagement across multiple generations of participants.

The session will also share emerging findings from an ongoing study examining the post-college outcomes of former peer mentors, highlighting how mentoring experiences shape leadership development, career pathways, civic engagement, and commitments to service. Together, these lessons demonstrate how sustainable mentoring ecosystems can generate lasting benefits for both mentees and mentors while strengthening the communities they serve.

Attendees will leave with practical insights for cultivating partnerships and mentoring structures that endure and evolve over time.

Beyond Mentoring: Designing Earning Ecosystems That Make Human Potential Impossible to Underutilize

Lisa Fain
Center for Mentoring Excellence 

For decades, mentoring has been recognized as one of the most powerful drivers of professional growth. Yet even in organizations with strong mentoring programs, talent often remains underdeveloped, leadership pipelines stall, and learning happens unevenly. The problem is not a lack of mentoring. The problem is that mentoring is too often expected to work in isolation.
Today’s workplaces are more complex, collaborative, and ambiguous than the environments in which traditional mentoring models evolved. Professionals are still rewarded for independence, yet the work now requires interdependence. Development is frequently left to drift, shaped by chance encounters, informal access, and uneven opportunity rather than intentional design. The result is a costly but often invisible outcome: underutilized human potential.
This plenary session introduces a framework for understanding mentoring as part of a broader learning ecosystem - a network of mentoring, peer relationships, developmental connections, and organizational structures that together shape how people grow. When these elements align, learning accelerates, judgment deepens, and individuals are able to contribute at their full capacity. When they do not, even well-designed mentoring programs struggle to produce consistent impact.
Mentoring is often discussed at the level of individual relationships, yet many of the challenges facing mentoring today are systemic. As organizations become more complex, the field must move beyond programmatic thinking toward ecosystem design. Rather than asking how to create better mentoring matches, we must ask how to design environments where mentoring, peer learning, and developmental relationships can work together to support growth.
Drawing on research in mentoring, developmental networks, and adult learning, along with decades of experience designing mentoring cultures across industries, Lisa Z. Fain explores the shift from developmental drift to intentional design. Using her signature “attaché” metaphor, she demonstrates how mentoring works best when it is supported by systems that encourage perspective, shared learning, and responsibility for development at every level.
The audience will consider why independence-based development models no longer meet the needs of modern organizations, how underutilization emerges even in high-performing environments, and what it means to design mentoring experiences that function within a larger ecosystem of learning. The session also examines the shared responsibility between individuals and institutions in creating environments where mentoring can thrive.
This plenary has been adapted specifically for attendees of the UNM Mentoring Institute, where the intersection of research, practice, and program design offers a unique opportunity to examine mentoring not only as a relationship, but as part of a larger developmental system.
By placing mentoring within the context of learning ecosystems, the session invites the Institute community to consider how the next phase of mentoring work may depend not only on improving relationships, but on intentionally designing environments where those relationships can have their fullest impact.
Attendees will leave with a conceptual framework, shared language, and a systems-level perspective on how mentoring can evolve to meet the needs of increasingly complex organizations and communities.

Building Leaders Through Developmental Mentoring Relationships

Sonya Hayes
University of Tennessee, Knoxville 

High-quality developmental mentoring relationships are at the heart of effective leadership development, yet many mentoring programs continue to emphasize advice-giving and technical support rather than mutual growth and learning. In this plenary session, Dr. Sonya Hayes explores how developmental mentoring relationships foster the growth of school leaders, strengthen instructional capacity, and support leaders across career stages. Drawing on research with principals and their mentors, she examines the relational conditions that enable trust, reflection, collaboration, and transformation. Participants will consider how mentoring, coaching, and professional networks can move beyond transactional support to create meaningful developmental experiences that benefit both mentors and mentees while strengthening organizations and improving outcomes for those they serve. The session will highlight key characteristics of high-quality developmental mentoring relationships and offer practical considerations for designing mentoring experiences that promote learning, growth, and leadership development.

Teaching Investigators to Build Their Own Mentorship Ecosystem

Maritza Salazar Campo, PhD
University of California, Irvine   

Most mentorship programs still pair one mentor with one mentee and hope the relationship will sufficiently support the mentee's developmental needs. This session presents findings from a National Research Mentoring Network intervention that took a different approach: teaching early-career biomedical investigators, many from minority-serving institutions, to build and manage an entire network of developers rather than waiting for a single relationship to work.

Over a 12-month program, investigators went through five workshops and one-on-one coaching sessions to assess their existing networks, then recruit new mentors to adapt their networks. Before the intervention, the experimental group differed from the control group in tie strength, network range, and disciplinary mix. After it, those differences were gone. Investigators had learned to shape their networks to align with their career stage and aspirations, fostering both short- and long-term outcomes.

The data also surfaced variation by ethnicity, gender, and grant type in how developmental networks form and function, with implications for institutions trying to provide career development support to their trainees.

Dionne Clabaugh
Angle 4 Solutions

The purpose of the three conference learning sessions (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) is to offer participants a series of sequential opportunities for application and action planning that directly relate to the conference theme and presentations.
Previous participants appreciated these curated learning sessions as personal and collective opportunities to make sense of conference experiences for feasible action plans that leverage and apply what they’re learning in presentations and plenaries. This has deepened participants’ experience of and connection to the theme, each other, and current research, which motivates attendance, learning, and application.
Each session builds on the previous day’s session and focuses on the conference theme. Tuesday’s session will explore, define, and share perspectives on ‘high-quality mentoring developmental relationships.’ Wednesday’s session focuses on current research that participants can discuss and apply to increase mentoring quality in personal and organizational contexts. Thursday’s session invites participants to articulate their learning and intentions toward feasible action planning, during small group mentoring circles facilitated by expert mentors. Each circle’s agenda will be prepared and facilitated by a selected mentor and focuses on a specific aspect of high-quality mentoring relationships.

Tuesday: Connecting to the Conference Theme

Building Effective Mentorship Ecosystems: Advancing the Science of High-Quality Developmental Relationships

Following opening remarks and description of the session purpose and guidelines, groups of 6-8 participants engage in story-sharing circles in response to two appreciative inquiry prompts and a cooperative learning activity to address:

• What does a high-quality mentoring relationship look and feel like?
• How does your organization’s mentoring ecosystem support and thwart your performance and development as a mentee, a mentor, a mentoring supervisor?

Wednesday: Leveraging the Conference Theme

Exploring the Science of High-Quality Mentoring Relationships

Following opening remarks and description of the session purpose and guidelines, groups of 6-8 participants engage in story-sharing circles in response to two appreciative inquiry prompts and a cooperative learning activity. This session addresses the following questions:

• What do you want to learn to increase your mentoring quality as a mentee, a mentor, a mentoring supervisor?
• What literature and resources have you used or might you use to increase the quality of your mentoring developmental relationships as a mentee, a mentor, a mentoring supervisor?

Thursday: Applying the Conference Theme Through Action

Select a development topic and join a Learning Circle conversation with an expert mentor (selected from Mentoring Micro-credential earners and Plenary Speakers)

Following opening remarks and description of the session purpose and guidelines, groups of 6-8 participants engage in learning circles in response to two appreciative inquiry prompts and a cooperative learning activity. This session addresses the following questions:

• Which developmental area do you want to work on to improve the quality of your mentoring relationships (as mentee, mentor, mentoring supervisor)?
• How do you prefer to learn as a mentee, a mentor, a mentoring supervisor?