Twenty years ago, if you’d asked the typical academic where coaching was happening on their campus, they’d point to the football stadium. Today academics are increasingly aware of the value of faculty and leadership coaching yet still mostly rely on private, off-campus providers. What if academics learned how to do some of that coaching themselves?
It’s not uncommon for new faculty members or department chairs to praise the benefits of hiring a coach. A trained and credentialed professional coach can offer you things you won’t often get from your mentors, including meticulous attention tailored to your needs, strict confidentiality, and structure and accountability for goal setting. But in fact, with a modest investment of time and effort, you could learn some of those same coaching techniques and use them to help your own mentees.
It took me nearly a year of formal training as a coach to get that memo, and I’m here to save you the time and trouble. As a vice provost for faculty advancement at Duke University who now coaches professors, trust me: You can be a more effective, more fulfilled, and less overworked mentor if you operate more like a coach. I’m not suggesting you sign up for an extended formal training program. A two-hour workshop can be enough to teach you how to execute a basic coaching conversation, and the more you practice these new skills, the better you’ll get.
Today’s graduate students and early-career academics are a diverse bunch. They still value mentors but need far more than they’re getting from the old mentoring model of a sage role model doling out advice. They came of age during a global pandemic, report mental-health disorders at much higher rates than other demographic groups, and are exposed to an unrelenting barrage of bad news about political, economic, and cultural upheaval, not to mention an employment landscape about to be upended by AI. As an academic mentor, your role is more complex nowadays, too. Institutions are making more demands on faculty time, research is more bureaucratized, and higher education is subject to mounting public attacks.
If, despite all of that, you cling to the notion that faculty mentors should have all the answers — well, how’s that working out for you?
Coaching, as one of my mentors on the subject liked to say, is “the art of not knowing.” A masterful coach can coach anyone, on any topic, because the coach is not the expert — the mentee is. They come to you with a problem they don’t know how to solve. The coach’s role is threefold:
- To provide a confidential, structured space to mull the problem.
- To prompt the mentee to remember all the skills and competencies they already have.
- And to help them explore their options — which, in many cases, may include seeking out more information or training.
Of course a coaching approach is not going to work in every situation you face as a mentor. If, for example, you’re training someone in lab safety, you must lean into your role as expert, or really bad things can happen. If you’re advising someone’s dissertation, you typically understand the field a lot better than your doctoral student, and you owe them the benefit of that knowledge. In many other cases, however, your eagerness to be “the expert” robs your mentees of agency and of the very real possibility that they could find a better solution than you. They just need a little help finding their way.
It’s not difficult to learn how to mentor like a coach, although it does take practice. The hardest thing may, in fact, be the mindset shift. If you really want to mentor like a coach, it’s not enough to learn coaching skills. You also need to fully accept that you aren’t the source of all knowledge in the relationship. You need to appreciate that your mentee isn’t you — and probably doesn’t want to follow precisely in your footsteps and become you. Because good mentoring really isn’t about you. It’s about them.
Once you get into the appropriate frame of mind, it’s time to consider what a coach would do differently from a typical faculty mentor. A coaching conversation follows a whole different structure — and is guided by a different set of rules and assumptions — than, say, the sort of chats you very likely had with your own mentors, and are still having with your mentees.
People training to become professional coaches generally start by learning basic conversational models. I describe one of them in detail in my recent book, How To Mentor Anyone in Academia, and illustrate how to execute it in a higher-ed context, based on an actual conversation I had with an overworked junior faculty member. I don’t have the space to explain it here, but I can offer the following list of things that the best coaches do, and avoid doing.
So if you’re motivated to up your game as an academic mentor, these five coaching behaviors can get your started:
Listen much more than you talk. The next time you meet with someone you’re mentoring, monitor what percentage of the time you do the talking. The best coaches let the mentee lead the conversation. When they do speak, they aim to avoid talking about themselves and make sure everything they say is in the service of the “client.” That means no personal anecdotes from your own career, no unnecessary digressions, and nothing that gets in the way of the mentee’s thinking.
Faculty mentors tend to tell a lot of “in my day” stories, so reining in that habit may require enormous self-discipline, especially at first. As a reminder, get a postcard and write down this helpful acronym: W.A.I.T., or Why Am I Talking? Keep it in your line of sight when you meet with mentees.
Ask “powerful” questions. Some academic mentors aren’t in the habit of asking many questions at all. Others may ask questions that come across as micromanaging or just plain demoralizing: “Did you check those lab samples yet?” or “Why didn’t you write a proper conclusion to this paper?” In coaching, by contrast, powerful questions are generated by curiosity — not a need to control. Such questions prompt the mentee to think in new and different ways: “What motivates you to do this work?” or “If time and resources were unlimited, what kind of impact would you want to have on our field?”
How you ask questions plays a role, too. One of the most disempowering questions a mentor ever asked me — after reading a lackluster draft of the first chapter of my dissertation — was “Who’s going to read your book?!” That could, in fact, have been a powerful question, except that my mentor sounded frustrated and angry — not curious — and I left the room in tears. Tone matters.
Provide focus and structure. Academics love nothing more than a good, meandering, thought-provoking conversation. It has its place in faculty culture — but less so in mentoring where it can lead to meetings that are inefficient at best, and a massive waste of time at worst.
Instead, try this coaching practice: prompt your mentee to set the goal of each meeting. For example, a graduate student might say, “I’d like to leave here with a strategy for resolving a disagreement with my collaborator.” Your role is to hold on to that thread throughout the conversation — guiding your student back to the point if they wander off on a tangent. As the meeting winds down, ask: “How prepared do you feel in talking with your collaborator now?”
Don’t cut off improvisation, however, when it seems to spark new thinking. Yes, it’s important for you to keep the conversation on track. But you don’t want a fixation on goals and structure to get in the way of creativity when your mentee’s mind starts to wander in ways that seem productive. In my own coaching, I’ve had clients who can’t come up with a clear goal for the meeting and just want to talk. Or, in the middle of a conversation dedicated to one topic, they decide it would be more helpful to talk about something else. In both instances, I run with that. When you mentor like a coach, you walk a fine, ever-shifting line between improvisation and structure, always in response to the needs of the person in front of you.
In allowing your mentee to run the mentoring meeting, you can expect pauses and long silences, as in any conversation. Give people time to think. If they need to draw a map, a chart, or a picture to represent how they’re seeing things, encourage that. Both parties are learning a new way of interacting when you are mentoring like a coach.
Build people up, don’t tear them down. Aim to emphasize your mentee’s gifts and strengths rather than hammer away at their weaknesses and deficiencies. Ask, “What’s already working well?” Whatever happens in a coaching session — whoever the person, whatever the topic — I know I’ve done my job if they leave feeling more empowered, capable, and confident than when they showed up. I don’t mean false confidence, but rather, the confidence of someone who has a better understanding of their strengths, growth areas, and situation.
Sometimes, if someone I’m coaching claims they are “not very good” at something — say, public speaking — I may ask them to rate their ability on a scale of 0 to 10. “I think it’s a 5,” comes the reply. Then I ask: “What keeps that number from being a zero?” People often look pleasantly surprised by that question, as they begin to acknowledge the abilities they already have.
At this point, maybe you’re thinking of all those times when you didn’t act very much like a coach — when your advice seemed to make things worse. Instead, I urge you to refocus on memories of the best mentors you ever had. What made them so helpful? Chances are, it was that they listened, asked good questions, cared about you as a human being, and kept you on track to achieve goals that you didn’t think you were capable of. In short, they behaved like a coach.
Now think about the most satisfying experiences you’ve ever had as a mentor. What happened? What, if any, coach-like behaviors were you practicing in those moments? By seeing yourself as a natural coach, you can begin to reach your full potential as a mentor.
Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from a new book, How To Mentor Anyone in Academia, published this month by Princeton University Press.
