Bad mentor stories are everywhere in academe. Earlier in my career when I coached doctoral students, some version of “I am having problems with my mentor” surfaced more than just about any other issue. Now that I coach faculty members, they also cite mentoring as an issue, but frame it as “I am having problems with my mentee.”
All of that coaching has given me a unique vantage point on the mentoring pains experienced by both parties. Two things have become clear:
- Most faculty advisers are highly competent, emotionally mature, and resourceful people who, nonetheless, could benefit from learning how to mentor more effectively — how to communicate expectations, deliver feedback, and create a climate of trust.
- Asking mentors to improve their individual skills and competencies means you are only dealing with the symptoms — not the systemic causes — of “bad” mentoring.
What’s at the root of bad mentoring? Is it a culture that rewards star researchers over strong teachers? Does it have more to do with tenure and employment policies that render institutions practically impotent in corralling toxic “monstrous mentors”? Both issues merit attention. But perhaps the biggest contributor to our mentoring woes turns out to be a self-inflicted wound: Within academic culture, we can’t seem to exorcise the ghost of the Revered Mentor.
Higher ed has a long history of celebrating and rewarding mentors less for what they actually do as mentors than for who they are — star professors with some combination of legendary scholarly accomplishment, “charisma” (a word I hear a lot from doctoral students), and je ne sais quoi. We routinely elevate the importance and status of the mentor at the expense of the mentee. Our perception of great mentoring leans heavily on the adviser functioning as role model (“become what I am!”) and advice giver (“do what I did!”). You are a great mentor if you imprint your essence on your impressionable mentee.
Our belief in that ideal worked so long as mentees wanted to turn into their mentors. That isn’t always the case now. Across higher ed, we’ve hit an inflection point at which traditional mentoring attitudes and behaviors no longer serve a changed mentee demographic.
Frequently, I coach faculty mentors who feel stymied by how to guide students who aren’t planning to apply for faculty jobs or otherwise follow in their advisers’ footsteps. Professors expect to train a new student the way they were trained but find that, increasingly, their advisees hail from different backgrounds and have a different constellation of needs. How do you mentor somebody who isn’t at all like you personally, and doesn’t want to become you professionally? What does that mean for your role and purpose as a faculty mentor?
The old approach — mentor as role model and advice giver — is no longer sustainable. To move forward as an academic mentor, you must rethink your role and purpose, from making it all about you, to making it much more about them. Of course mind-set and behavior change are extremely difficult. The comfort and familiarity of the old ways can often blind us to the fact that they no longer work. And for accomplished professors, advice-giving and role-modeling are relatively easy ways to mentor — and they also feel so damn good.
At this point, readers might be thinking, “Of course mentoring feels good. It’s about helping people, isn’t it?” Sometimes, however, the motivation to “help” has little to do with other people. Many of the activities traditionally associated with mentoring, for example, also serve to elevate the mentor’s sense of self-importance. Edgar H. Schein, in Helping: How To Give, Offer and Receive Help, writes that simply being asked to help puts you in a superior position of “One-upness.” The one in need of help, conversely, occupies a subordinate position of “One-downness.” And talking about yourself — all those stories of how you slayed dragons on your way to academic fame and fortune — is also inherently rewarding. In one set of experiments, subjects were offered either a small sum of money or the opportunity to talk about themselves. Which do you think the majority chose?
Active listening, thoughtful questions, and checking one’s ego are among the most powerful modes of being helpful to anyone, mentee or otherwise.
No doubt plenty of readers would say they were very well served by a favorite mentor whose approach relied on copious amounts of advice-giving and role-modeling. That’s been my experience, many times over. And to be fair, our mentors did those things because that’s what they learned to do from their own mentors. But today’s mentees are facing much lower odds of landing a tenure-track post. They want and need more, and many aren’t shy about asking for it: They want advisers who can listen to them, appreciate them for who they are both at and beyond work, and be collaborative thought-partners for complex academic and professional challenges.
Increasingly, institutions are turning to formal workshops and training programs to help faculty mentors adjust to this altered landscape.
I’m on board with any event that encourages professors to be intentional about their mentoring practices, and I’ve helped organize some at my own university. These interventions, however, can be costly in terms of faculty time and institutional money. And before asking mentors to attend any “training” — not exactly music to the professorial ear — we might reasonably ask: What is the goal here? Is it merely to stamp out bad mentoring habits or is it to inspire good mentors to become transformational ones?
Mentoring, at root, is about human relationships. If you seek to be a transformational mentor — as I hope you do — you will need to turn your sharp analytical skills on your own mentoring assumptions and practices. As a coach, I guide professors in reflecting on how they mentor people (among other complex work and career issues). So I have plenty of ideas on how to do that and will talk about some here. You can find much more in my new book, How to Mentor Anyone in Academia, published this month by Princeton University Press.
To improve your mentoring, you first need to take a hard, honest look at what’s actually going on in your own adviser-advisee relationships. To what degree is your mentoring style driven by your own belief in yourself as a Revered Mentor? Or to put it more bluntly: Has your ego become a stumbling block, both for you and your mentee? To answer that requires asking yourself other tough questions about how you interact with your graduate students and Ph.D.s:
- How much do you talk about yourself? Are you relaying that personal anecdote to model something critical for your mentee, or is it a victory lap or nostalgia trip for you?
- How much do you dominate the conversation, in general? If a third party were to log the time you spend talking in a typical mentoring meeting, would it exceed 50 percent? Or 60 percent? More? What else could have been happening while you were holding forth?
- How much advice do you give? According to sociologists, giving advice enhances one’s prestige, whereas seeking advice can reduce someone’s status. A thoughtful piece of advice, at the right moment, can boost someone’s career. At other times your advice might rob your mentee of the opportunity to figure something out on their own or with fewer directives from you.
- How much do you care what your mentee thinks — on any topic? Nancy Kline, in her book Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, challenges educators to ask students what they think “five times more often than you tell them what you think.” What is that ratio in your mentoring relationships? How often are you telling mentees what you think, without knowing (or asking) their perspective?
- How good are your listening skills? Your mentee may be happy to tell you what they think, but are you paying full attention?
- To what extent are you genuinely curious about who your mentee is as a person? Their values, hopes, fears, and dreams? Some mentors just don’t care. Other well-intentioned ones may see this arena as fraught with peril — at best, “too personal.” If you invest time in setting healthy professional boundaries and building trust with a mentee, these topics need not be a third rail.
The old model of mentoring survives to the present day for many reasons, perhaps chief among them: That kind of mentor can mentor alone — without shared standards of practice, without peers to hold the adviser accountable, and without having to expend much thought or energy.
So if you’re ready to say goodbye to the Revered Mentor model and play a transformative role in the lives of your mentees, where do you start?
Active listening, thoughtful questions, and checking one’s ego are among the most powerful modes of being helpful to anyone, mentee or otherwise. But they are also among the hardest things to do — as any coach, counselor, and therapist can tell you — because they are at once counterintuitive and countercultural.
A training program can get you started. But really, the only way to unlearn bad mentoring habits and learn good ones (how to become a good listener, pose the right questions, and check your ego) is through lots and lots of practice. Mastery in helping mentees — in truly meeting their needs rather than your own — requires ongoing reflection: How did that conversation go? What did my graduate student take away from it? What did I do that was most helpful? What could I have done differently?
Take the time to think about your mentoring. Talk about it with trusted colleagues, your own mentors, and, to some degree, even your own mentees. Workshops and training programs can be critical first steps at building mutual accountability and thoughtful communities of practice. And institutions have to sustain and nurture those communities for the long haul, especially when the post-training “high” wears off and people get mired in the routines, pressures, and ingrained work habits of everyday life.
Today’s grad students and new Ph.D.s don’t have the same needs as their counterparts from 20 or 30 years ago. And neither do their mentors. A thoughtful organizational strategy to build strong cultures of mentoring must take the needs of both into account.
