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One-way mentoring tends to be unsustainable, but reciprocal mentoring relationships can make both parties feel valued, increase empathy, and enhance psychosocial safety, a new book says.

In his foreword to Reciprocal Mentoring – a collection of papers edited by Julie Haddock-Millar, Paul Stokes and Nora Dominguez – professor David Clutterbuck says the problem with both traditional (senior-junior) and reverse (junior-senior) mentoring, is that the learning they encourage is one-way.

Such mentoring relationships also tend to be transactional – each party offers the other something different – but in reciprocal mentoring, "each party offers and receives the same kind of gift – learning about how the world works from another person's perspective"...