Wrong! We often make the assumption that everyone that has been successful themselves will make a good mentor. And that mentoring is easy or comes naturally. Isn’t it just being a nice person and being generous enough to spend time assisting a more junior colleague?
I call this the benevolent colleague approach to the mentoring role.
Not only can it do harm, it is so much less than what mentoring can offer, both the mentor and the mentee.
So, how can this approach be harmful?
In my experience, mentors often resort to giving advice, based on their own career experience. A sample size of 1.
This advice may be outdated, times are different and constantly changing. I have mentors in academia who recognise how much harder it is to succeed now than it was for them a decade or two ago. Basing advice on what worked for mentors in the past is not adaptive to the current circumstance.
Mentor’s advice may not translate across difference - in gender, age, sexuality, life circumstance, cultural difference, ambition and so on. I have had mentees say to me, “I can’t possibly do what my mentor advised me to do”. In fact mentoring can leave people feeling worse about themselves and their lack of career or organisational fit. It can undermine their confidence or confirm their fears that this is not the place for them. No mentor wants to have that impact.
The senior people in most organisations are less diverse than their more junior colleagues. Not only are they less diverse, they are more likely to have trodden a normative career path. This means that their advice is often not enabling, or could even be undermining their mentee’s capacity to consider more diverse ways of succeeding. In academia senior academics for example, may mentor junior colleagues to be academics, but not assist them to consider alternative career paths outside of academia. Given the precarious nature of employment in academia this is a significant omission.
Mentors may be biased and unaware of their bias. Research has shown that mentors sometimes discourage women from applying for the next promotion. “You’re not ready”, “you might need to tone down your leadership style” and so on. This is highly problematic and especially so when often the intention of mentoring programs is to assist women and other groups in the workplace who may not be thriving because they are experiencing bias and discrimination.
Mentors bring great goodwill to their role as mentors. They want to have a positive impact. But that doesn’t mean they are skilled. It doesn’t mean they have thought about the different approaches to mentoring. It doesn’t mean they have thought about alternative ways of doing careers. It doesn’t mean they’ve had the opportunity to reflect on or mitigate their bias. It doesn’t mean they’ve had good mentoring experiences themselves to draw on.
To make sure your mentoring program is fit for purpose you need to work with your mentors, not just leave them to get on with the job. They need support and development. And of course we need to value and reward the mentor role.
If you have plans for a mentoring program in the New Year now is a great time to discuss how I might support your program.