Babson’s Wendy Murphy Keynote at 9th Annual Mentoring Conference
Babson Associate Professor of Management Wendy Murphy was the keynote speaker at the 9th Annual Mentoring Conference, Developmental Networks: The Power of Mentoring and Coaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico October 24-28, 2016.
Each year, the Mentoring Institute hosts its Annual Mentoring Conference. Featuring four keynote/plenary sessions and over 300 presentations total, the 2015 conference attracted 800 people to New Mexico. We aim to host a broad constituency, which includes divisions of higher education, academic researchers, educators, community leaders, administrators, non-profit partners, government agencies, and other professionals.
Murphy’s Keynote Address
The nature of careers has dramatically changed with increasing job mobility, globalization, and technological innovation. In response, the scholarship of mentoring has broadened its scope from a traditional dyadic perspective to a developmental network. A developmental network is defined as a set of people who take an active interest in and action toward advancing an individual’s career. Developers may come from within the organization or outside the workplace, and offer varying amounts of career, psychosocial, and role modeling support, or just one function. At their heart, these relationships are about learning and growth—whether you work with college students or seasoned professionals.
Continuous learning is critical to success in the knowledge economy, making it imperative for leaders and organizations to foster developmental networks. Research concerning developmental networks offers compelling evidence that a network of relationships enables more success than a single mentoring relationship. During this session, we will discuss how to frame traditional mentoring relationships within the context of developmental networks. This presentation draws on Strategic Relationships at Work: Creating your Circle of Mentors, Sponsors, and Peers for Success in Business and Life (McGraw-Hill, 2014), where the presenter (first author) and Kathy Kram explain how to apply scholarly insights to the practice of mentoring. Attendees will learn ideas and tools to identify, map, and assess developmental networks.
Wendy Murphy
Wendy Marcinkus Murphy, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management at Babson College. She primarily teaches organizational behavior for undergraduates and managing talent in the graduate programs, as well as customized executive education. Currently, she is Co-coordinator for the Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME) program, a yearlong interdisciplinary course in which students create, develop, launch, and manage a business. She has served as the Faculty Advisor for the Mentoring Programs through the Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL). Prior to joining the faculty at Babson College, she taught at Boston College and Northern Illinois University. She earned her A.B., M.S., and Ph.D. from Boston College.
Murphy has published her research in several journals, including the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Career Development International, Gender in Management, Human Resource Management, Journal of Management and the Journal of Vocational Behavior among others. Her book with Kathy Kram, Strategic Relationships at Work: Creating your circle of mentors, sponsors, and peers for success in business and life, applies the scholarship of mentoring to help everyone become an entrepreneurial protégé.