Mentoring That Works
How to Reimagine Mentoring That Works For Today's World of Work
Welcome! This week’s newsletter is all about mentors, and comes with inspiration from my conversation with Emily Gilogoski, SVP and Head of Research at Charter. For other episodes on mentoring, check out my conversation with Whitnie Narcisse. If you’re new here, drop me a line to say hello.
Back when I was a freshman in college, I realized I wanted to one day run for Student Body President. Over the course of the next 3 years, I built a relationship with each of the Student Body Presidents, and more or less nagged/befriended them (politely) so I could learn what I could, before I eventually became Student Body President.
When I was at Deloitte, I relied heavily on the analysts and consultants who had gone through my own lived experience just recently to shortcut mistakes, get feedback, and see around corners where I knew I had blindspots.
After I gave my first real paid speaking gig and realized how far over my head I was, I went and met the speakers in the space who were farther ahead of me on their journey so I could navigate through my own journey through their lessons. I’ve learned greatly from my experiences in the classroom, but learned exponentially from meeting and connecting with other people.
I’m fortunate that I learned at an early age, many of the answers to questions you have, people either have already figured out, made that mistake, or have some ideas about. And even if that person hasn’t figured it out, the right people can certainly help you figure it out, if you ask.
Knowing that my success would be directionally correlated to the amount of people that wanted to help me succeed, I made a point of investing time in relationships so I could learn from others and take back into my own experiments and trials. For me, mentorship has been about connecting with other people to fuel my learning, performance and connection, and it’s been my own personal accelerant for career success.
Today’s Workplace and Why Mentoring Matters
I’ve been thinking a lot about mentoring lately, especially as more and more leaders force employees to return to the office, many times in the name of mentoring, collaboration, and connection. To be honest, I feel ambivalent when this happens. On one hand, I’ve learned significantly from mentoring and mentors, and they are responsible for much of my ability to navigate successfully in the workplace and in my career. I know many others out there have relied on their relationships with others to fuel career success.
But on the other hand, I’m not convinced, from the research as well as anecdotal conversations with employees and leaders, that mentoring magically just happens.
To help me make sense of some of this, I spoke to Emily Goligoski, SVP of Research at Charter. Emily and her team in conjunction with Qualtrics did some very insightful research on mentoring in the workplace, and we got the chance to discuss some of her findings on The Edge of Work (Episode here)
A quick summary of their findings:
Hybrid work does not limit the potential of mentoring. Successful mentoring relationships were similarly likely to occur if mentor and mentee met remotely, in-person, or a mix of both. Mentoring literally can happen from anywhere
Frequent check-ins matter Some (51%) of very successful mentors meet with their mentees once a week or more often, compared to 37% for somewhat successful mentors.
The Manager still matters - They found greater success with formal mentoring processes when mentors share their updates with their mentee’s managers (51% vs 34%)
Note: For a full summary of their report, check out this link
Reimagining Mentoring For Today’s Workplace
One of the reasons why mentoring is so popular is because many of us as individuals can point to lived experiences where a mentor made. Whether it was learning how to solve a specific problem, gaining perspective from a trusted person on how to navigate a tricky situation, or simply watching someone do something like manage a meeting, that you could then do on your own, many of us have had these experiences.
This is especially true, for individuals who haven’t worked in the workplace before (ex: early career professionals) or are brand new to a new organization or culture (onboarding new employees, or leaders making transitions into new roles.) Getting exposure to these benefits from a mentor can impact your ability to get things done (Ex: productivity)
This is not to mention, all of the benefits you get, from being able to connect with another peer, or group of peers, or a felt sense of belonging you might have when you realize you aren’t alone as an employee.
It’s clear that mentoring is important and that it has the potential to unlock numerous business outcomes including productivity, engagement and retention, not to mention, strengthen the connection that people inside your organization have with each other, as well as your company.
But if we keep trying the same approaches that we’ve done in the past, we may not get the benefits of what mentoring could be. So where are we falling short?
We don’t define it clearly
Mentoring can mean a lot of different things. When it’s not clear what it means, it leaves open for interpretation how mentors act and behave. This can lead to inconsistent experiences in mentorship programs for mentees and mentors. Oftentimes, it defaults to what the mentor believes mentoring to be. This isn’t always a bad thing, but isn’t always inclusive.
We align it’s importance with our strategic priorities
Many companies say that mentoring is important, but yet, don’t take the time to resource it proper training to mentors and mentees, or allowing for enough time for it to happen. What’s also true is that mentoring often is not tied to other important objectives, like say performance reviews, or expectations for managers and leaders. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed.
We aren’t intentional about it
One of the biggest priors executives rely on that I wish we’d get rid of is that by assembling a group of people together, things like collaboration, innovation will just happen. Mentoring falls in the same bucket - until you actually are intentional about how you structure it and create space for it to happen, it’s going to be hard to realize the benefits in a strategic and systemic way.
To further this point, Goligoski and her team found that mentoring, when done intentionally, saw no constraint on place, meaning that mentees were able to achieve their goals from a mentoring program regardless of whether they were remote or in-person.
Old map, new world
As my favorite Einstein quote goes, “You cannot use an old map to explore a new world.” For many aspects of mentoring, we’re still relying on the old map. First, many of us view mentoring in a hierarchical fashion. A seasoned executive or leader takes on a more junior analyst and bestows their wisdom and their experience. This was great for a certain kind of person, but what about the person who doesn’t want to become a leader?
In their research on mentoring, Rajashi Ghosh and Sanghamitra Chaudhuri noted an example of this that happens far too often:
“Latika was a mentee paired with Agnes in the formal mentoring program of their financial services organization. Agnes had risen up the ranks through hard work and had a reputation as a tough but fair leader. In their first meetings, Agnes emphasized the sacrifices she had made. “You cannot be halfway in,” she said. “If they want you to close business deals over late-night meetings, you do that. If getting things done means skipping lunch, you do that. You have to show that your work is the most important thing in your life.” Agnes told Latika that as a woman, she would have to do even more than a man to prove herself.”
Relying on hierarchical elements in mentoring as well as creating a construct where a senior executive passes on their lived experience to a more junior employee highlights the challenge in designing mentoring programs that are inclusive and equitable. Leaders, many of whom came up during a different era of work, are passing on their perspectives and experiences from a different era. The workplace is more diverse today than ever before, and people may have different interests.
The reality is that many leaders today tend to come from a similar grouping: if you’re solely relying on hierarchy to determine who is a mentor, you’re excluding a bunch of other diverse people who inside your organization who could be great mentors, but were shut out because they weren't seasoned executives.
While that scenario isn’t extinct, removing hierarchical structures in the mentoring-mentee relationship provides for a much more inclusive, creative, and expansive way to have people come together to share knowledge, solve problems and generate opportunities for mentees and mentors.
So how might we think differently about mentoring in order to create a better workplace? Here are a few places to start:
1) Clearly Defining What Mentoring Is and What it’s Not
One area we must focus on is on actually defining what mentoring is, and the specific actions and behaviors of what mentorship actually looks like. One of the reasons efforts often fall short is what also makes it so popular: We all think we know what it is because of our own lived experience, but unless we actually collectively define that inside our company, we all end up doing what we think it is which causes for all sorts of missed expectations.
A starting point to make mentoring work is to actually define what mentoring is inside of your organization, as well as the specific behaviors and actions of what “good mentoring relationships” look like. As Emily noted in our conversation, mentoring is different from advising, sponsoring, coaching, and many other terms that often get grouped with mentoring. I’m less concerned around the definition that you decide on it for, and more concern that it’s intentionally designed and agreed upon in your organization.
2) Train Mentors and Mentees on what good mentoring looks like
As a leadership and talent practitioner, I’m the first to caution against any solutions that involve training as a first solution to solving the problem but in this case, I think this is actually the right approach. Because of how many of us think we know what mentoring is, our worldviews then shape how we enter into our mentoring relationships.
But when we do that, we run the risk of projecting our own beliefs about mentoring onto someone else. Due to the diversity of lived experiences, this also limits how a message might land with someone who has a different experience or comes from a different background.
Furthermore, if your organization clarifies what mentoring is and what it isn’t but doesn’t actually train mentors on the behaviors they want to see, it will be very hard for you to see the results that you hope to get.
One organization I spoke to told me in their training, one of the very first things they tell mentors is to let them know that this experience is not about them and to forget any preconceived beliefs they have of mentoring.
This is not due to the fact that they don’t respect their mentors, but more so because they want to make sure that their mentors understand that while their lived experience is important, the organization has a standard definition of mentoring that they hope to see out of the program, and wants to make sure that mentors (and mentees) have the tools they need in order to effectively make that happen. This also helps prevent the example I highlighted earlier about when your mentor is giving you advice based on their lived experience that doesn’t really help you navigate yours.
I’m inclined to believe that this can (and maybe should) look differently at each organization, but the exercise of both defining and then training mentors on what good mentorship looks like should not be understated.
3) Go Beyond the Hierarchy and traditional organization constructs
In today’s complex and changing workplace, the world of work moves fast and leaders can’t be expected to have all the answers. Great ideas can come from anywhere, and we all can learn from each other’s lived experiences. Mentoring is helpful because many of us are just looking for answers, and relying on other people can help us find them.
If we believe these things to be true, we can start to think more creatively and expansively about how to set up mentoring programs.
Instead of just relying on the hierarchy of leaders as mentors, passing on their knowledge to junior staff, we can start to get more diverse mentor-mentee relationships, both in terms of attracting mentees who want to participate, and providing mentoring opportunities to individuals of diverse backgrounds. Not everyone wants to be a seasoned executive, so getting other perspectives for people who have different career interests has a lot of merit.
We can also start to make mentoring about helping each other learn, exposing someone to new ideas, or helping them gain knowledge to go further on their specific terms, and less about a mentor passing their “wisdom” to someone else.
And while I do think that “reverse mentoring” has some merit, I would actually argue that still very much is a hierarchical construct that still serves the executive in that relationship and we can go even farther than that. I would go as far to say that the mentoring program needs to be first and foremost about the mentee, and their goals.
Conclusion
One of the words that I think best describes what we need for today’s workplace is the word “intention.” We need to be much more intentional about work, and the same is true for mentoring.
According to Goligoski, mentoring done right is still one of the “best kept secrets” of organizations.
I’d love to see a world where that isn’t the case, but to do that, we need to think differently about how we have thought about mentoring and design programs that are fit for today’s world of work.
Have a great week!
Al