A manager cannot be a mentor—but should still give advice
18 Apr 2021 Tags: Soft skillsMentoring. Everyone thinks it’s a great idea and many claim to do it. Yet both formal studies and my personal observations suggest that such relationships are rarely sustained and often not retrospectively valued by the junior participants. To sustain effective mentoring many elements must be in place but I believe that an essential requirement is this: The mentor cannot have authority over their protege. The mentor’s suggestions must be suggestions, not orders. Without that basis, the whole relationship falters. Teaching and supervising are distinct roles from mentoring, however much they share elements with it. The advisory nature of mentoring affects every aspect of the relationship.
The basic roles: Mentor and protege
The typical mentoring relationship comprises two roles, which are variously named. I prefer the terms used by Johson and Ridely in Elements of Mentoring (all sources listed below), “mentor” and “protege” (or “protégé” if you’re feeling francophilic and got your Unicode workin’). I find the latter term far preferable to the neologism “mentee” (OED’s first recorded use in 1965), which is both ugly and has near-cognates meaning “lie” in many Romance languages. In contrast, “protege” (OED’s first recorded use in 1786) incorporates connotations of “one who is protected”.
The mentor is older and mid- to late-career, while the protege is younger and in the early stages of their career. I think the relationship works best when mentor and protege are at the same level of professional qualification. In an academic context, the mentor might be a tenured professor while the protege is a newly-hired, tenure-track professor. The key part is that the protege has passed the primary certification for their profession, such as a Ph.D. in most academic disciplines, the bar exam in law, and similarly for other fields. Fields that do not have formal certification will often have accomplishments that the community agrees indicate a newcomer has achieved membership, such as the first non-student production of their work, first newspaper byline, and so forth.
I don’t see this as an absolute requirement but the protege’s status as a full-but-inexperienced community member sets the stage. They are competent in the mechanics of their profession but still finding their way within their professional community.
Developing professional judgement
As a new member of their professional community, the protege’s primary challenges lie in that realm: choosing amongst opportunities, networking, building alliances, establishing a reputation. They include time management but with a different focus than for a student. The protege’s focus is not so much on accomplishing tasks as on establishing a professional identity within their community. Given this focus, the goal of the mentoring relationship is the development of the protege’s professional judgement. How should the protege handle a conflict? Should they trust a potential collaborator? Is an opportunity likely to be long-term or a dead end?
Mentoring fosters the growth of this judgement by suggesting opportunities, alternatives, and critiques of possible choices. But judgement and independence are intertwined. The protege fully exercises their judgement when they have ultimate responsibility for their choice and its consequences. If the mentor has any sort of supervisory capacity of the protege, their suggestions carry the tacit weight of directives. No matter the spirit in which the mentor intended their comments, the protege understands that their adoption of these suggestions will affect their next assessment. If the protege wants that good recommendation letter or good salary bump, they are well-advised to adhere to the appearence of the suggestion, if not the full spirit.
In developing their judgement, the protege must be able to treat any feedback from their mentor as a gift, to do with as they wish, whether that means following it to the letter, adapting it, igonoring it, or doing its opposite. The mentor’s role is best seen as providing resources that the protege may use at their discretion as they build a career. That freedom to adapt is an essential part of their growing capacity in effective judgement, a process that certainly includes making their own mistakes, at least occasionally. The protege only has that freedom when the mentor’s opinion of their choices has no effect outside of their discussions.
The world of the protege is not the world of the young mentor
The protege’s freedom to use or abuse their mentor’s advice is not only essential to their growing judgement, it also protects them from having to force-fit advice that is out of date. The professional environment of the protege will differ substantially from that in which the mentor began their career.
Popular culture includes such archetypes as “Old-Economy Steve” or “Long-Tenured Sandra”, with their advice to pay for an entire year of university by working for ten weeks as a camp counselor or ensuring tenure by publishing two or three good papers. The joke is that however apt such advice might have been when those individuals were young, the culture now requires vastly more effort to achieve these goals. The suggestion only reveals how uselessly out of touch the would-be mentor is from the actual needs of the protege.
The mentor must always bear in mind that the protege understands the complexity of their circumstances in far greater detail than the mentor. In this regard, I am heavily influenced by the principles of Clearness Committees, originally developed by the Society of Friends and popularized within the educational community by Parker Palmer. The driving assumption of this method is that the community’s role is to support the individual as they solve their problem by themselves. Although I do not believe that mentoring ought to be as structured and potentially demanding as a Clearness Committee, I think this guiding principle applies. If the mentor believes the solution to one of the protege’s major problems is simple, that most likely indicates that the mentor does not understand important circumstances that are readily apparent to the protege. The mentor’s role is to provide resources for the protege to solve their problems as they see them, within the opportunities and constraints of their actual situation.
In Advice for New Faulty Members, Boice reports that mentoring often goes off the rails by devolving into sessions of “tales of the mentor”, a series of vignettes from the mentor’s early career. Such stories may be appropriate but only if they clearly support the protege in their choices. Most times it is better to focus on methods of refining the protege’s understanding of their problems and opportunities.
Teaching, managing, mentoring: Overlapping but not the same
Though teaching is not mentoring and managing is not mentoring, they all share common methods. Teachers and managers ought to give advice and suggestions—that’s a key part of the roles. But such advice must always be given in light of the supervisory nature of these roles. Teachers and managers are coaches and gatekeepers, providing encouragement and discouragement, applying rewards and sanctions. On occasion they must ask one of their students or subordinates to leave because they simply will never fit their current environment. This organizational reality underlies every praise, criticism, or request. The teacher or manager must at all times be honest with themselves about this. The student or subordinate is well aware of it even if the teacher or manager ignores it.
If you’re a manager, by all means advise your subordinates. You’d be remiss if you didn’t. But bear in mind that none of your suggestions have the freely-given nature of mentorship. You might help your subordinates, especially those finding their circumstances especially challenging, find a mentor from a senior member of their professional community who is entirely out of the protege’s reporting line. Properly done, such relationships can be invaluable in developing a new professional’s judgement.
Sources
The ideas in this post are inspired and informed by the following authors, though I do not believe that any of them emphasize the non-supervisory requirement as much as I do here.
Advice for New Faculty Members
Robert Boice’s classic—and controversial!—advice to new faculty members. He devotes several sections to reports of studies he did on the nature of successful and unsuccessful mentoring relationships. I believe that this material is general enough to apply to non-academic contexts.
I read the first edition of this book, published in 2004. I see that as of 2018 it is in its third edition, subtitled “75 Practices of Master Mentors”, with an emphasis on the research published in the intervening years.
Parker Palmer’s classic book on the emotional heart of the teacher-student relationship. I have found his section on Clearness Committees, particularly the emphasis on “honest, open questions”, of great use in many interactions, often far outside the structured contexts of such committees or the domain of teaching.