Meaningful Mentoring

By: Brendan Epps

Meaningful mentoring is critical to our success.  It’s not simply telling someone what to do.  It’s helping them understand for themselves what may work best for them.  Mentorship may also include helping them with resources or information to get there.  I think many people have an idea of what mentoring is, so I’ll offer a few ideas for why and how.

Diversify Your Mentors
Mentorship comes in different forms and meets different needs like career development or personal growth.  Finance experts often tell people to diversity your investments.  Don’t invest all your money into one investment.  Farmers tell people to diversify too:  “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket."

Depending on your background, you may not have been exposed to some of the customs and cultures that help you advance; those unwritten rules.  While the workplace is changing in some ways, there’s still a dominant culture upholding the way people have “always done it” in that organization.  A mentor can help you understand and navigate that culture.  A mentor may also be able to help you change aspects of the culture that needs to.

That’s right...mentors...plural.  Have more than one and for several different reasons.  There are too many perspectives to just take one person’s word for it.  Mentors with different backgrounds from you can help you with perspective; and isn’t that the point of diversity?  Will it work all the time?  Of course not?  If things were perfect, we wouldn’t need mentors in the first place.  But things aren’t perfect and we do need meaningful mentoring to make our journeys easier and more manageable.

Formal or Informal
You don’t need to be called a mentor to be a mentor.  Nothing wrong with having the title, but it’s not required.  A good foundation to establish with your mentor is how formal will the relationship be.  Typically with mentors senior to you within your organization, keep the relationship professional, possibly semi-formal.  For a couple of reasons: 1.) ensures you maintain respect for their position and authority in the workplace, and 2.) minimize the appearance of improper relationship (i.e. fraternization or favoritism).  But informal mentioning can be just as valuable as formal mentoring.

During a week of classes, a few classmates helped me understand what “mansplaining” is over dinner.  I wasn’t aware that was even a thing, let alone a behavior men, like me, do that marginalizes women.  They helped me see that when I treat a co-worker in a condescending manner, it can distract her from giving her best to the task at hand.  It also makes her less willing to communicate with me and give me a heads up when I’m about to make a mistake.  And trust me, I make a LOT of those, so I can’t afford to deter people from pointing them out before I make them.  My classmates mentored me, making me more aware of bias I didn’t even realize I had.  By doing that, even in an informal setting, they helped me become a better mentor to the women I mentor and helps me mentor other men to be more aware of our bias.

Even at home, we call mentoring parenting.  Obviously in the workplace, mentoring won’t be as involved as parenting your children, but I challenge you to look at situations where you’ve been in a leadership position and see if there aren’t parallels.

Get Out of the Office
Mentorship isn’t limited to the workplace.  You can also have a mentor in church, with extra-curricular activities, with hobbies, or at the Y.  These are people you trust to provide you with honest feedback to the best of their ability.  They’re also people you trust to tell you when their ability isn’t enough; often simply by saying, "I don’t know, I’ll have to find out," or "I can point you to someone who does."

Mentorship is not limited to work.  If you find someone passionate about being left-handed (the best-handed) and has learned how to use spiral-bound notebooks without scratching your arm or how to plan where you sit during office luncheons  (because yes, it does matter to us) that person could mentor you; ask a lefty if you don’t understand.  While this may seem trivial if you’re not left-handed, something as simple as where you sit in a restaurant can help you be more social, which in turn can reduce stress and may help with connections in or out of the workplace to further your success.  It’s not about every moment, it’s the collection of those moments over time.  Meaningful mentorship helps you better understand those collections of moments.

Make Mentoring Meaningful
Mentorship is a key ingredient to success in anything we do.  Ask questions and seek a variety of mentors who can help you achieve your goals.  Likewise, look for ways to help others—with their permission—to achieve their goals.  Meaningful mentorship takes time, because along the way, you’re building a relationship.  It takes time to get to know each other, but anyone who’s had a meaningful mentoring relationship will tell you the time is very well spent.