What is the role of a mentor?
Mentoring has become quite a buzz word for creative and professional development. It is increasingly common for first-professionals take jobs with below market rate salaries when these jobs are paired with the opportunity for mentoring in their first year. There is now an emerging market for those at the top of their game to teach or mentor the upcoming generation from their acquired technical skills and experience. Unfortunately, many times the mentorship falls very short of the mark. While the intentions may be solid, the mentorship is not because the emphasis is solely on the mastery of specific technical skills. Yet we have all encountered those special individuals who seem to possess the hidden 'super power' of mentorship. Those mentors who seem to call forth greatness in others regardless of the baseline level of ability in the apprentice. What is it that these influential mentors have that others don't? What practices and tools are used in that deep mining process that reliably produces diamonds from within the mentee? And perhaps more challenging - can those practices and tools be taught in order to transform mediocre meddling into mindful mentoring?
I think it can.
Mentoring is different from teaching. Mentors may use teaching skills at times and occasionally those in a teaching role may be operating as mentors, but teaching is not mentoring. Teaching is providing knowledge that the student does not have. Mentoring is bringing awareness to what the mentee already possesses. Both are needed. Before I make an attempt to describe what I believe is needed for effective mentorship, let me share a comment from the brilliant statistician, Dr. George Box, PhD who wrote: "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I wholeheartedly agree with him and hope this model with its flaws might be one of the useful ones.
Dr. Donald Clifton was an implementer and catalyst of the positive and strengths psychology movement. He was a transformational leader with an uncanny ability to influence others and is credited by the American Psychology Association as the Father of Strengths-based Psychology and the Grandfather of Positive Psychology. The Clifton-Strengths Finder was made enormously popular with his book Now, Discover Your Strengths co-authored by Marcus Buckingham and the model has been extensively researched in organizational and personal leadership applications and boasts nearly 24 million completed profiles. In 2007, the book was updated by his grandson Tom Rath and called StrengthsFinder 2.0, which is listed as Amazon’s bestselling non-fiction book of all-time. Because Dr. Clifton’s model is focused on discovering and developing innate talent and skills within individuals to function at their highest and most impactful selves, his model can easily be applied to mentoring and can even provide the mentor a framework for choosing where to spend time and energy over the mentoring process. The Clifton-Strengths model uses three key tenets where each can be developed independently or synergistically. Clifton’s model seeks to identify talents, which he calls our "naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior”, that are the innate, natural abilities we can productively apply. To turn those talents into strengths, we must invest in them which requires practice using them and adding additional knowledge and skills to them. For clarity the three tenets of the Strengths model are defined below:
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Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned
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Skills are the steps of an activity
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Talents are the naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior
This mentorship model is essentially presented as a guide in how to develop the three tenets of the Clifton-Strengths model in those that we mentor which if effective may in turn increase their sphere of influence, impact, and effectiveness in the world.
Knowledge - (the facts and lessons learned). The mentor’s role here will by definition look very much like a teacher. It is my belief that some mentors get stuck in this role with motivations of mentoring but fail to develop their ability to work in the other two tenets and thus fall short in effective mentoring. Here, information, facts, and lessons are imparted through teaching and learned through experience. The mentor’s role here is to takes steps to foster curiosity within the mentee who then ultimately self-identifies “what” the lesson being learned is. Often the lesson being learned is not what one might assume from observation of the pair. For example, if the mentee is reporting on a process but fails to use the established checklist, forgetting a key component, the learning may not be feedback on the missing component, but the value of using trusted checklists and not placing too much confidence on one’s own memory despite how sharp it might be. The mentor should also attempt to bring awareness to moments of experience that present opportunities for the mentee to allow knowledge growth. Does teaching occur? Yes, but mentoring in the knowledge tenet of this model requires more. It requires bringing awareness to where the learning is happening.
Skills - (the steps of an activity). Developing skills does not require practice….it requires deliberate practice. (reference this Harvard Business article) To increase skill there is a prerequisite that the steps of an activity are known. Before building skills in any area it is crucial that both the mentee and the mentor share a common understanding of the specified steps. Deliberate practice of the skill has three key components:
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Deliberate - An agreement on what step (or combination of steps) is being practiced. In my experience failing to establish a conscious agreement on what is to be practiced is one of the most common mistakes made in mentoring a skill, eclipsed only by failing altogether to define the steps of the skill to be practiced.
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Feedback - While this would seem common sense to most, the feedback must not just be provided. The skilled mentor is able to provide the feedback in a way that the intended message is actually received. This requires a mastery of language, non-verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and self awareness from the mentor.
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Time - Yes, time is a function here. While it cannot be cut short, it most certainly can be squandered and thus prolonged. The mentor's role here is to use the rubric of 'time spent vs. skill development observed' as a mirror into his or her own ability to appropriately select the agreement for deliberate practice and skillful feedback. For example, if the development in the agreed upon deliberate practice does not match the amount of time or energy spent on the skill, the step may need to be broken down into smaller steps, or perhaps the feedback is being given but the intended message is not being received. Small and deliberate course corrections using the 'time spent vs. skill development observed’ sextant allow skilled mentors to successfully navigate the individual's needs.
Talent - (the naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior). The role of the mentor here is simple but is perhaps the most difficult of the entire model. The mentor brings an invitation into honesty and integrity-with-self to the mentee. For the sake of clarity and at some risk of oversimplification I have reduced this to two areas for the mentor to bring awareness to the mentee:
Blind Spots - This is a term that is generally used to describe an area of talent (patterns of thought, feeling or behavior) where the individual is unaware of an opportunity to be developed. It may be as simple as a recurring non-verbal expression such as “umm….” that creates an experience of unpreparedness or lack of skill where there may not be. Or perhaps, it’s an uncanny ability to connect with individually with people and adapt the communication style with seeming effortless ability. Both can be developed but require awareness and a willingness to look honestly at the behavior without self criticism or judgement.
Bully Spots - This is a term that is generally used to describe an area of talent (patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior) where the individual perceives their ability is better than the results would suggest. This is often where significant growth will occur, but the mentee may need a gentle invitation from the mentor to look honestly and with integrity at the mentee’s own beliefs and motivations for theses patterns of thought and not just restrict the conversation to the behaviors observed. For the mentor to be most effective here, kindness, empathy and humility are paramount.
It is my opinion that an effective mentor is one who is able to use a model such as this to foster growth in the sphere of influence, impact and effectiveness of another. However it is the masterful mentor that is able to identify new areas for their own self awareness and growth that come through the mentoring relationship with a novice. Can the effort I place in developing a skill in another also bring awareness of an area where learning is occurring in me? Can the skill of recognizing naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior in another be a blind or bully spot for me? We all have more to learn. The mentoring relationship provides a wonderful classroom.
“Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Author
Andrew Bennett
I am a thinker, a writer, and a creative. Discovering who we are, the True Self, requires a willingness to remove the camouflage we have constructed and reveal our most basic unadorned person. No longer seeing only what we wish to see, we can begin to become the whole. My hope is by sharing from my own journey, I may be an encouragement to you on yours.
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