Designing Workplace Mentoring Programs
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TheNatureofMentoring1.pptxThe Nature of Mentoring
Although the ultimate goal of mentoring is to help others improve, there are several key differences that set it apart from coaching.
These include:
Coaching focuses on improving performance related skills, but mentoring focuses on improving the skills necessary for coping and self-management.
Coaches have a specific agenda whereas mentors do not.
Often, individuals or groups do not get to pick who their coach will be; however, those being mentored often select who their mentor will be.
Coaches have either limited or implied authority, whereas mentors have none. They simply facilitate.
Coaches benefit from increased performance. Mentors gain from the richness of the experience.
Material adapted from The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Relationships, Zachary, L. (2000), Jossey-Bass
The Learner’s Role
One of the most important things to remember about mentoring is that unlike coaching, the one being mentored (i.e., mentee) takes the central role in the learning partnership with his or her mentor.
As such, the mentor simply serves as a guide, offering advice and counsel but leaving the decision making entirely to the mentee.
This does not mean that mentors do not play an active part. Mentors play an active role in facilitating the relationship, ensuring a positive learning environment, helping the mentee to establish priorities, participating in the learning process, and helping the mentee discover and utilize resources.
And while the mentor’s role is to challenge and to provide guidance and support, it is ultimately the mentee’s responsibility to become self-directed.
Mentor Awareness
Effective mentoring depends on the mentor understanding that his or her role is to facilitate the mentee’s learning and growth. Therefore, mentors must avoid projecting their own experiences onto their mentee. Otherwise the mentor is simply creating a copy of themselves.
A mentee cannot achieve their own individual growth is they are simply being molded into the same form as their mentor. As such, in order to establish a foundation for the learning relationship, mentors need to:
Achieve self-awareness by reflecting upon their own experience, and understand how and why they are different from others.
Understand and reflect upon the experience and individual learning style of their mentee, and engage them in discussions about how they felt about those situations and events.
Acknowledge that their path and the path that their mentee has followed are separate and distinct.
Learning Constellations
Of all the skills mentors possess, having the ability to conceptualize the ‘constellation of forces’ influencing a mentee is one of the most essential.
Effective mentors, through observation and discussion with their mentee, are able to envision the network of interconnected forces (known as an ‘ecology’) that push and pull mentees in one direction or another, and that direct their actions.
These forces include their friends, family, job, employer, social groups, their own self-concept, and even their hobbies and interests.
Often times, a mentee is not able to see or understand how the effects of one factor influence others. As such, learning and growth are often limited when gains in one area result in losses in another.
Effective mentors help the mentee to learn how to better cope with and manage these often competing forces, both cognitively and emotionally.
Creative Tension
Another essential skill of effective mentors is not just understanding a mentee’s individual learning style, but being able to develop and employ a variety of techniques to appropriately challenge them.
For example, if a mentee learns best through observation and insight, then the mentor may use a technique that challenges them to reflect upon an experience in order to achieve a greater level of understanding and maximize the learning opportunity it presents.
Such an exercise may cause frustration and confusion, but if the exercise appropriately challenges the mentee’s learning style, and if the mentor provides the proper feedback, then it will motivate the mentee to work harder at understanding.
Consider the case of the ‘Parable of the Sunfish’ from the book “ABC of Reading” by Ezra Pound (1934), which has since been retold in varying forms to illustrate the role of a mentor.
Parable of the Sunfish (paraphrased)
Professor Louis Agassiz, a natural sciences professor, wanted his students to learn the fundamental nature of biological taxonomy, but knew that if he simply gave them the answer (based on his own knowledge and experience) then his students would not understand why it was so. Recognizing the difference between his own level of experience and theirs, he presented his students with a simple yet challenging assignment: to observe a fish preserved in a jar and “learn everything you can” about the fish, giving no other instructions.
After looking at the fish for several hours, he asked the students what they had learned. Frustrated, the students replied that “it was simply a fish”. Professor Agassiz then told the to “look at it again”. This went on repeatedly for several days, and eventually the students began to notice things like the shape of the fish’s scales, and the relationship between its body and fins etc.
But even these observations did not satisfy the professor, until one day a student remarked that the totality of the features established this particular fish at a certain point within the taxonomic hierarchy.
Professor Agassiz’s method of challenging his students to repeatedly “look again” was a highly effective way to facilitate learning, without ever having to provide them with the answer himself.
Phases of Learning
Effective mentoring relationships almost always progress through 4 identifiable phases.
Phase 1 is preparing for the mentoring relationship by taking into account the uniqueness of the mentor and the mentee through discussion and interaction.
Phase 2 is a period of negotiation where learning goals, expectations, responsibilities, and needs are clarified and agreed upon.
Phase 3, enabling, is when the learning takes place, where the most contact occurs, and is often the longest phase to complete. During this phase the mentor must focus on challenging and monitoring the mentee’s progress, providing a nurturing and supportive environment, and providing constructive feedback.
Phase 4 is closure, where the mentee’s learning outcomes are evaluated, acknowledged, and celebrated. It is also an opportunity for the learning relationship to end in a positive way.
Mentor Characteristics
While mentoring (like coaching) is a positive endeavor, not every mentor is effective. Knowing what mentoring is does not guarantee that the mentor will be a success.
In order to better determine whether or not an individual has the potential to be an effective mentor, consider the following characteristics:
Effective mentor characteristics include:
Recognizing and believing in the potential of others.
Possessing and being willing to share a network of personal and professional resources.
Being patient and tolerant of others, and being willing to put the learning relationship above everything.
Being comfortable with and enjoy giving encouragement and recognition to others.
The ability to suspend their own attitudes and beliefs in order to objectively assess information and see the ‘big picture’.
Ineffective mentor characteristics include:
Being too busy to invest the required time and energy.
Using the mentee for assistance or to complete assignments you do not want to do yourself.
Having the tendency to be overly critical or authoritative.
Not understanding, appreciating, or even being aware of the current trends and events that impact and shape others in today’s world.
Being afraid that the success of your mentee would undermine your own position and status and might make you unwilling to provide the mentee with all of the support and resources that you are able to give.
Contemporary Challenges
Generational differences in the workplace create differing, and often competing, sets of values and expectations, particularly for Millennials.
Recent data suggests that Millennials are not opposed to mentoring; however, they have clear preferences for how the mentoring relationship is initiated, structured, and maintained.
A good summary of these preferences can be found here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaytiezimmerman/2016/07/18/modern-mentoring-is-the-key-to-retaining-millennials/#2e36d6bf5fc8
