Mentoring

Helping You Helping Me… and/or vice versa

This week, I was delighted to spend time with a young woman I’ve mentored. I’ve known her since before she was in kindergarten, and we regularly call and text, but it’s been years since I’ve seen her in person. We had a couple long meals and did some sightseeing as we chatted and caught up. We laughed—and teared up a little—as we reminisced about Halloween and Christmas parties and more when she was a little girl. But mostly, I just burst with pride as she told me about her most recent accomplishments.

It was just such a joy watching her grow up. It was equally wonderful to see her be all grown up.

Thinking about all that brought to mind some of the fascinating scholarship there is on mentoring.

So in this issue, I’m going to tackle some basic constructs. For the next couple biweekly editions, I’ll have some tips on mentoring for individual mentors and mentees, as well as organizations setting up mentoring programs. Then, we’ll explore the pros and cons of alternative approaches to mentoring (including how mentoring is different than coaching).

What is Mentoring, Exactly?

You’d think it would be easy enough to define mentoring since it’s a term based on a character in Homer’s ancient epic, The Odyssey. However, there are at least 40 definitions of “mentoring” in the academic literature. (As depicted in one study, no less than Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein debated its meaning in 1921: Edison believed that mentors should teach students’ facts and formulas, “while Einstein countered that mentors should promote new thinking in students…. ‘to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.’”)

This lack of consensus over the term has consequences. It confuses mentors and mentees, in terms of what they should expect to get out of, and contribute to, a mentoring relationship. One set of researchers once found that the confusion can be great enough that mentors and mentees often don’t recognize when they’re in a mentoring relationship… with each other.

So let’s start with a fairly traditional construct: Mentoring is when someone (i.e., a mentor) gives advice and other assistance to a younger person with less experience and/or knowledge (i.e., a mentee or protégé).

In the mid-1980s, researcher Kathy Kram pushed this idea into a new direction when she concluded that workplace mentoring consists of two fundamental elements: psychosocial support and career assistance.

Psychosocial support describes the emotional, social, and psychological aspects of one’s work-life: how to handle a difficult coworker, deal with the stress of an upcoming big event, a shoulder to lean on when you screw up, and so on. Career assistance relates to the more tactical aspects of work—learning new skills and planning career goals. It’s professional development, in every sense of the phrase.

Since then, researchers have argued (with Kram concurring) that there’s a third component: social connection and networking. Mentors advocate for mentees. They introduce them to new people and new opportunities, and they help mentees navigate the politics of these new settings.

Kram also proposed that this sort of intense mentoring relationship isn’t a casual, brief encounter. Instead, it’s a years-long process consisting of four phases:

• It begins with a 6 months-one year long period of Initiation, getting to know one another and building trust.  

• Then there’s Cultivation—2-5 years of working together as mentor/mentee.

• And a Separation, a 6-month to 2-year period when they struggle with the stress that comes from the mentee no longer needing a mentor, and then finally,

• Redefinition, when their relationship gradually shifts to something closer to being peers and friends

  

  Quick Shots

• A 1970 study found that two-thirds of the 4,000 execs in recognized in Wall Street Journal’s “Who’s News” had a mentor.   

• According to a March 2024 report, 98% of the American companies listed in the Fortune 500 have a mentoring program—up 14% in just three years.

• Analyses of “The Academic Family Tree” have concluded that Nobel Prize science winners are more likely to have had Nobel Laureates as both mentors and mentees.

The Rise of Formal Mentoring

Historically, mentoring was informal, thought of as something that upper classes did for their progeny—that “mentors” was the more polite way of saying members of the “old boys’ network.”

But scholars started to analyze the value of mentoring: Those who were mentored were more likely to be promoted and make more money. And from the organizational perspective, mentored employees were found to be better performers, more skilled, more committed to their organization, and less likely to leave. Sun Microsystems once concluded that its mentoring program had a jaw-dropping 1,000% return-on-investment.

With stakes like that, more organizations and individuals began establishing formal mentoring programs, laudably hoping to ensure that everyone—especially the historically-excluded (e.g., women, racial and ethnic minorities)—could get the mentoring help that they’d need for success.

Over time, organizations (schools, companies) were pitching the importance of having a formal, designated mentor,* until it seemed to have led to a belief that formal mentoring is better than informal mentoring.¹

However, the research shows that informal mentoring is better than formal mentoring.

Informal mentoring is more effective because the mentor/mentee relationship is more genuine and long-lasting. Go back to Kram’s phases and that mentoring is a 4-7 year-long relationship. Formal mentoring programs are much shorter. Indeed, the duration of many formal mentoring program is often shorter than just Kram’s initiation phase.

Informal mentoring is driven by what the mentee wants and needs. By contrast, formal mentoring is driven by an organization’s goals and desires for the mentees.   

The problem with informal mentoring wasn’t about its efficacy. The issue was (and is) about its accessibility.

That said, an organization’s formal mentoring program requires time and resources, so we may hear more about the programs that didn’t meet expectations, while no one is keeping tabs on failed informal mentoring. As some have argued, there’s no researcher or grant funder keeping track of how two people met but nothing came out of their interaction except for a meeting at Starbucks. Perhaps a reason that informal mentoring seems more successful is because its failures are hidden (even from its participants) by the very nature of informality.

In Your Sight

• Context is an important element in mentoring. For example, a mentor’s science background has more impact over a mentee’s scientific career choice if the mentee’s parents aren’t already scientists. If they are, then the mentor has less influence.

• One study concluded that 15% of mentoring relationships fail because the mentors didn’t understand their responsibilities as mentors.

• According to an analysis of 40,000 scientists and their 1.2 million papers, being the mentee of a prize-winning superstar scientist meant that a mentee was two-to-four times more likely to become a scientific superstar in their own right. The researchers concluded that the key to the mentees’ success was not about teaching them essential scientific facts. It was that the mentors had taught them how to pursue an original idea and then communicate that groundbreaking work.

  

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1. I began joking it felt like an unwritten Dr. Seuss book, Are You My Mentor? Turns out, I’m not the only one who has had that reaction.