Not all mentoring relationships are created equal. Mentors and mentees adopt a range of approaches to the mentoring relationship. I have developed a simple framework, using a game analogy, to highlight different mentoring approaches. Mentors and mentees in my programs have found this invaluable for thinking about what is possible, creating a shared language to discuss their relationship, identifying where they may be misaligned or what might be missing, and understanding the full potential of mentoring.
It’s a game
People sometimes get offended when I refer to building careers as a game. I am not being flippant, nor trivialising workplaces or our working lives.
What I am doing is calling attention to the need for a strategic approach to building a career.
Much like a game, many careers and workplaces have intricate rules, some written but many of them unwritten, that you learn over time and with experience. There is complexity, with choices and decisions that lead to different payoffs, requiring various degrees of risk, and a need to look a few moves ahead. You get the idea. Careers don’t just happen. It is this career complexity that can make mentoring so valuable.
What is the game?
Mentors, often as a result of greater experience and seniority can teach mentees a lot about the bigger picture, how the organisation works and what really counts. This can be a really important part of mentoring relationships, but is not sufficient. Many mentoring pairs can spend a lot of time here, filling in the gaps. Mentors are often frustrated that mentees dont know more about the rules of the game. Quite rightly, in my view, they expect that the rules of the game should be learnt from supervisors and peers in the day to day working environment. In corridor chat, over coffee or lunch and as part of supervisory and performance review processes.
Understanding the game is foundational to careers and foundational to a productive mentoring relationship. However once this is better understood, what is the role of the mentor?
How you should play the game. The traditional approach
A commonly adopted approach to mentoring is where mentors advise the mentee how they should play the game. They describe their mentoring role as ‘teaching the mentee to succeed the way I succeeded’. I have observed that this is an approach where mentors feel they can value add, and feel comfortable.
However I caution mentors to consider the dangers of giving advice based on the strategies and approaches that have worked for them. It is, after all, advicel based on a sample size of one. Advice often does not translate well across any differences between the mentor and mentee, for example age, and gender. If, for example, the mentor has succeeded through overwork and giving in to the demands of the greedy institution at the expense of family life, most likely they will advise the mentee to do the same in order to succeed. Mentees may be unable or unwilling to adopt this approach. Mentoring relationships can stall when this dissonance is experienced by the mentee.
Unfortunately many mentoring relationships do not proceed past this point. Playing the game the way that it has always been played, is ultimately a replicatory approach that maintains the status quo. This mentoring works best for those who are most similar to those who have already succeeded. It undermines organisations’ diversity and inclusion goals, and workplaces remain unchanged. This approach fails to build a more diverse and inclusive workplace and lacks agility in responding to emerging challenges and a rapidly changing world.
Mentoring can be so much more than this.
How do I want to play the game? The developmental approach
Mentoring relationships can become a shared exploration. Once the game is well understood it is possible to go deeper, asking questions such as;
How can I craft a working life and career that suits my identity, my hopes and dreams, my goals, my values, my strengths, my circumstances, my life stage, my family? How can I make this work for me?
The mentor’s experience can be put to good use, as a guide, assisting the mentee to strategise and plan.
Is this really a good opportunity or will it lead to a career dead end?
Is this a good committee to sit on?
How can I position myself to be visible?
Should I move employers?
The developmental approach requires more skill on the part of the mentor, and relies on building a trusting relationship. Rather than the mentor proffering solutions, the mentor and mentee together explore options, with the mentee supported and challenged to implement the actions they have chosen.
Mentors who adopt this approach can learn a great deal about their organisation and themselves. Understanding the challenges experienced by the mentee, can reveal the ways in which the organisation may be hindering those who do not fit the dominant group, or are unable to follow the normative career path.
How can we change the game and the way it is played? The bifocal aproach
If systemic issues are revealed in the developmental mentoring relationship, mentees and mentors may proceed into challenging some of the rules of the game.
Mentees and mentors can engage in a rich learning journey together, exploring ways in which the existing game systematically advantages some and disadvantages others. Mentees can be supported to push back against organisational structures and cultures that constrain their aspirations and ability to craft a working life that works for them.
For example, rather than helping those with caring responsibilities, often women, to fit into existing structures and cultures, both the mentor and mentee can work to change the existing game. Different questions arise.
How can I challenge aspects of the game that do not work for me and others like me?
How do I make more room for myself and others to move from the normative career path?
What boundaries can I set without being penalised?
How can I assert my value without doing the long hours?
How can I be true to myself in enacting a different sort of leadership style?
This can become a valuable learning experience for mentors, as they consider their organisation from a different perspective. Mentors can become advocates within their own spheres of influence for doing things differently rather than maintaining the status quo.
This last approach, based on my research is what I call the bifocal approach, and I will explore this in more detail in a future blog.
Bifocal lenses assist with near and distant vision, enabling the mentor to keep the mentee and the organisation in clear view
Three very different approaches to mentoring
These three approaches represent a movement;
from advice giving to co-creation to shared change agency and growth.
from replication of the past to creating a different future,
from fitting in to creating new ways of being successful,
from accepting the status quo to resisting and changing the status quo,
The more traditional approach is designed to benefit the mentee while leaving the mentor unchanged. The developmental approach benefits the development of both mentor and mentee, while the bifocal approach delivers outcomes for the mentee, the mentor and the organisation, in building more equitable, diverse and inclusive workplaces.