Mentoring - part 1
Happy Valentines Day! As mentioned in my introductory post in January, a mentoring relationship was the inspiration behind this blog. It feels like a good time to delve into mentoring and create a blueprint for how it can work better.
This post is part one and I will publish the second part next week. The aim is to pick apart my own mentoring experience to identify an effective way to establish mentoring relationships, how to extract the best value out of them and what are the benefits that can be gained by the mentor, mentee and the wider organization. I am sure there are alternative ideas that might be more effective. But given my previous failures as a mentee, the inadequate training on mentoring and the lack of visibly successful mentoring relationships in the workplace (they no doubt exist but aren’t publicized), I am hoping to contribute something useful that fills a gap.
I get approached reasonably frequently for career advice. This is usually because I have experience working overseas and I have made the move from a specialist department into general management. Both changes owe quite a bit to tactical luck rather than expert planning. Those looking to replicate either or both moves often seek out people like me to request advice or encouragement that they are on the right path. I’m more than happy to give my opinions when asked, but the advice will be based on limited information in a snapshot of time. A better solution could be a mentoring relationship that can evolve with career progression and is able to help navigate the inevitable trade-offs between short and long-term goals.
To start, it’s worth having some definitions. Coaching, training and mentoring are similar and in some cases the terms can be used interchangeably. However, whereas both coaching and training focus on specific acquisition of skills, mentoring can assist more broadly with personal and career goals. In terms of contact time, training is usually the shortest and most structured, coaching is a slower approach and lasts long enough for the acquisition of skills to take place with periodic follow-up and mentoring is usually open-ended. Because the scope and duration of mentoring are not defined, it should be considered less about an expert transferring knowledge and more a relationship where the greater lived experiences of the mentor can be used to inform and assist the mentee. The huge advantage of mentoring over either coaching or training is that it also enables reverse mentoring whereby the mentor can take advantage of the perspectives and insights of someone at an earlier stage of their career.
In part one I want to answer the following three questions: what are the essential requirements for a mentoring relationship, who are good candidates to become mentors and how do you pair mentees with mentors? I have deliberately not considered who are good candidates to be mentees as the only criteria is that a potential mentee must want to be mentored.
For the first question I have good news: a mentoring relationship can exist between any two people and the only essential requirement is that there is a sufficient gap in their relative experience. What is a sufficient gap? I doubt anyone has done a study with a definitive answer, but if the gap is too small the mentoring experience can only help the mentee bridge a very small part of their career and reverts to a coaching relationship or to a relationship between training partners.
Take the gym as an example. On day one I go to the gym and I avoid paying for a personal trainer or a coach and I ask a more experienced gym-goer if they will let me observe/train alongside them. If that person has only been training for a couple of years, the gap in experience is so small that we are effectively training partners and learning/improving the same skills at the same time just from slightly different starting points. If the person I ask has been a gym regular for much longer time, the gap in experience will be significant and I probably won’t be doing the same exercises or programs and therefore I won’t be getting coached as much on specific tasks. Instead, I might focus more holistically on other things that help me. This could include their motivations, the way they approach certain exercises, the order they train their body, gym etiquette and learning rep patterns that they have tried and moved past but had previously helped them break training plateaus. I could pick up diet and sleeping tips and details on activities that happen outside the gym but help when my mentor hits the gym. If I am really lucky, they will help me avoid showering at the same time as the guy who uses the hairdryer to blow dry their private parts in full view of everyone else (thank you for the memory Virgin Active on Oxford St, London).
The mentee should choose someone with a significant gap in experience, but this doesn’t need to be age. For instance, if you are moving into a completely new discipline, a mentor may be a similar age or in a similar part of their career, but they could have substantially more experience in the new area.
As to who should become mentors, the answer is anyone once they feel they have established a significant and broad level of experiences. I would also add that they should feel confident in their own abilities and that through their experiences they have been able to not just survive but to learn and grow. Let’s frame this in three questions. When you look back at your career are you satisfied? If you could do it all again, would you make the same decisions? Why did you give that answer in question 2?
The first question is an honest assessment of your career to date. Even if you are ambitious and looking to jump to the next level, you can still answer yes if you feel like you have put yourself in a position where that next jump is possible. Answering “no” does not rule you out from becoming a mentor. However, if you answer “no” to the first question and answer “yes” to the second question, then maybe mentoring isn’t for you. This means that you aren’t happy with your career and have come up with no answers as to what you would do differently that would be beneficial to a mentee. Any other combination of answers to the first two questions leads to question three. If you can’t answer why, I would argue that you haven’t yet given your career experience enough thought to be beneficial as a mentor. If you can answer why, then there is no reason for you to rule yourself out as a mentor and you almost certainly have something to offer. How to be an effective mentor I will cover fully in next week’s post.
For complete transparency my answers are “yes”, “yes” and the why is as follows. Looking back there have been approximately 5 years of a 24 year career where I did not enjoy my job or I questioned my choices. I know exactly why I didn’t enjoy those five years and I learnt so much about myself during that time, particularly my strengths and weaknesses, that ultimately the benefits outweighed the downsides. Add to that some amazing colleagues I worked alongside during those years, plus the chance to make some embarrassing mistakes in roles where I struggled to care much about the outcome, I am much richer for the experience and later parts of my career have benefited far more than if my chosen path had been smoother. Those five years include the first three years of my career as an auditor. I was not a good auditor, and it was not my destiny to stay an auditor, but the shadow of that role is so great that none of what followed would have been possible without enduring those three years.
How to pair people up into a mentoring relationship is harder to answer. The most common way starts with the mentee or more accurately key stakeholders of the mentee. As a manager if you have a junior member of your team who has expressed an interest in their career beyond the immediate next steps, they will probably benefit from some mentoring. Alternatively, companies may encourage mentoring through specific programs. I think this is effective, particularly if it targets high-performing junior talent as a reward for their efforts as it also establishes the value of mentoring. In both cases either the manager or the HR team can help identify a mentor that compliments the mentee.
Much less effective is when companies use 3rd party matching apps that anyone can sign-up to. I am sure the intentions of all involved are good, but the impersonal nature of this process does suggest tokenism and being seen to support mentoring without the required effort. These apps are not very good, and the matching seems to be random based on the available mentors and mentees that sign-up. If only one mentee candidate and one mentor sign-up, does anyone believe that the system wouldn’t pair them together, even if the requirements of the mentee are not met? The value of mentoring is devalued with the poor experiences that are inevitable on this approach. So-called mentoring relationships that follow in-house training courses for a specific timeframe either with members of the training team or the senior exec team should be re-labelled correctly as coaching. From experience, although they can be valuable, they don’t provide many of the benefits of mentoring.
Finally, some employees take on the initiative and go looking for their own mentor and use their formal and informal networks to identify someone who matches their criteria. I am fully in favor of this, and the only negative is that it highlights the gap in the organization that a more formal mentoring program could occupy which could be scaled to benefit more people.
It is harder, but not impossible, to initiate a mentoring relationship as a mentor. You can’t really go looking for mentees, but your informal network may bring you into contact with someone who expresses an interest in being mentored and you can offer your services. The better route would be to make yourself known as a resource to HR, but again this highlights the gap that a mentoring program that proactively identifies mentors should fill.
In this post I have attempted to answer the initial questions of “what”, “who” and began to answer “how”. Next week I continue with “how” and move onto “why”. Given that this blog is an authentic expression of my thoughts, I wanted to add this coda. These will be the 7th and 8th posts I have published respectively and I have noticed how passionately I feel about mentoring as I write about it. I hope that this translates as you read it. I feel an obligation to do my part to demystify and promote mentoring as a valuable and over-looked tool, which is a sentence that I never imagined typing a couple of years ago. As always, if you have thoughts or feedback please continue the conversation in the comments on Substack or Linkedin. Feel free to share this with anyone you think would find it useful.