UVA-OB-0277

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UVA-OB-0277 Don't Worry About Mentoring

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UVA-OB-0277

DON’T WORRY ABOUT MENTORING The public animation about mentoring and the need for mentors in the career development of young people in organizational life has created some unfortunate phenomena. First, many business students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels have felt anxious about finding a mentor and getting the benefits from mentor/protégé relationships they see as essential to their career development. Students are asking, “If mentors are so critical to career advancement, how do we find them?” Women especially have been encouraged to seek mentors as a means of breaking into the ranks of historically male-dominated management. The titles of several articles reflect this pressure: “Professional Women and Their Mentors,” “Mentoring for Career Women,” “Mentors and the Successful Women,” and my sarcastic favorite so far, “Mentor Mania: The Search for Mr. Right Goes to the Office,” which accompanies a drawing of a woman sitting at a desk with a tear in her eye wondering, “How will I ever make it alone?” Managers are also concerned about new expectations arising from this publicity. They wonder whether or not they can be mentors and whether or not they want to be mentors, especially to some of their less-favored subordinates. Managers are asking, “How can we be mentors?” “Do we really have to be mentors?” and—in an attempt to step back from personal involvement—“How can we institutionalize a mentoring program in our organization?” Articles with titles such as, “Becoming a Mentor: Are the Risks Worth the Rewards?” only increase managerial anxiety over mentoring.

Sources of Mentoring Anxiety There are several roots of those anxieties. The first has to do with definition. The terms “mentoring,” “mentor/protégé relationships,” and “mentors” have become so popular and so indiscriminately applied that they have lost much of their specific meaning. Ed Schein (1978), some of his students (Davis and Garrison, 1979), and others have identified a variety of roles that “mentors” play. They include sponsor, teacher, role model, challenger, leader, counselor, protector, and friend, among others. Those terms are inherently ambiguous, and because mentoring implies bundles of them, the uncertainty of the user’s intent multiplies. Thus, when ____________________________________________________________________________________________ This note was prepared by Professor James G. Clawson. Copyright © 1984 by the University of Virginia Darden School Foundation, Charlottesville, VA. All rights reserved. Adapted for classroom use from an article published by Mr. Clawson in EXCHANGE: The Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal and copyrighted by The Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, 1984, Stanford, California. To order copies, send an e-mail to [email protected]. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of the Darden School Foundation. Rev. 9/90. ◊

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the term mentoring is used in literature or in conversation, one is seldom sure whether the user means to imply one, a subset, or all of those roles. That produces anxiety for the mentors-to-be, because they are not sure what they are supposed to do to be a mentor; it also produces anxiety for the protégés-to-be, because although they know it is important to find a mentor, they are not sure what to look for. Second, anxiety increases because the term mentoring focuses attention on external causes of personal success. Those who seek a mentor (and often those who want to institutionalize the process) seem to be searching for quick answers to career-long questions such as “What does it take to be ‘successful?’” and “How do I learn what I need to know about the profession and the organization?” My observation is that we simply cannot know the outcome of our career strivings until time has passed—and having a mentor will not give us the answer. When one’s focus shifts from what the individual can do to succeed in the here-and-now to what others can do for the individual at another time, one yields a host of opportunities to develop personal effectiveness—perhaps until it is too late. Young people, by virtue of their educational experiences and their positions in the adult development process, already frequently rely on authority figures to guide their growth. The popular focus on mentoring makes it easier for students to continue to hold others responsible for their career development rather than taking increasing responsibility for it themselves. This is not to say that there aren’t situations in which the support of others is useful— anything from helpful to absolutely critical—to one’s development in an organization. Pioneers who are different from the majority members of an organization may require help overcoming the in-group’s historical biases. It is to say, though, that form and substance go hand in hand: neglecting one’s current relationships and skill development for the sake of searching for a patron in high places is counterproductive. Actively creating opportunities to meet potential sponsors or coaches while developing one’s current relationships and skills, represents a balanced, mature, and responsible approach. The mentoring term can wastefully narrow one’s focus in two ways. First, prospective mentors and protégés begin to take a binary view that they either have a mentoring relationship or they don’t. That view can reduce their willingness to consider the gradations of mentoring that lie between the extremes of “is” and “is not.” Mentoring is less like a desk that one either has or doesn’t have and more like the concept of “an effective work space,” which can be described and developed along several continuous dimensions. Second, a focus on mentoring can cloud one’s view of other kinds of relationships that can be very rewarding and productive. Some, in the search for an ideal mentoring relationship, overlook the benefits of developing other relationships that might achieve collectively even more than a single mentoring relationship. They lose sight of the diversity of the orchard because of one apple tree. Finally, the mentoring literature reeks of urgency. Reading it, one gets the idea that unless one gets a mentor, and soon, one’s career is doomed to idle on the runway. This urgency is born of the still widespread—but inaccurate—view that success is a function primarily of the rate of increase in power, wealth, and status. The impression left by that literature is that the high