A common concern about engaging with institutional mentoring programmes is that they are simply a way to increase performance, increase control, and demand more of our research or academic staff members.
Combined with a lingering idea that mentoring might be patronising, an embarrassing ’telling off’, a way to deal with people who ‘aren’t good enough’ or who ‘need to up their game’, there is understandable tension about engaging with mentoring.
Because of its strong roots in the management and business worlds, a lot of the performance-based language commonly used in defining a scope and remit for mentoring doesn’t help us out much — which is why it’s always important to define an ethos and a set of aims for your programme that fit the needs and the language of the people you want to benefit from it.
Some examples of such grating language are below, taken from commonly used definitions of mentoring, for example:
‘…help by one person to another’
‘…a senior or more experienced individual (the mentor) is assigned to act as an advisor’
‘…the purpose of mentoring is always to help the mentee to change something – to improve their performance’
‘…challenging the mentee, and using candour to force re-examination and reprioritisation’
‘…helps develop full potential’
‘…in which results can be measured in terms of competencies gained’
But mentoring doesn’t have to be a way of ‘forcing’ people to ‘get more skills and ‘achieve measurable results’ but instead can be accessed by mentees, on their terms, to enable them to make sense of the demands of their role and workload, to understand their experiences, and to move forward feeling supported.
In short, to find an open ear and an open mind.
If your programme is set up with a developmental (not evaluative) set of founding principles, engaging in mentoring/coaching conversations can be based in collectivity and in connecting to others (take a look here at the Res-Sista Academic Manifesta for more on this), working in opposition to the pressures of individualistic competition. How can it? Because:
- It gives people time to think: mentoring can offer a space to sound things out, to think out loud, and to talk things through – together with a person who has volunteered some of their time.
- The role of the mentor is listening and supporting…not telling, instructing or advising.
- It’s a voluntary process for those who feel ready to engage, not a compulsory intervention or way of managing performance.
- It treats people like adults: mentoring assumes capability, not a deficit of skills, or unfulfilled potential.
- It’s a non carrot/stick way of developing new learning that doesn’t make threats or offer competitive rewards. Instead, learning is led by the mentee, we are working at the level of intrinsic motivation.
- Learning through mentoring is tailored to the agenda of the mentee, it values the opinions and preferences of the individual learner.
- Data generated through mentoring programmes can be used to collectively evidence issues that staff report, that in isolation can be dismissed as ‘anecdotal’.
Yes, there are tangible ‘hard’ outcomes from doing mentoring in this way — in that a mentee may get a new job, a promotion, publish a paper, or apply for or win research funding. But these things are secondary effects, resulting from the confidence and self-esteem that grows when you have the opportunity to spend time connecting with someone else, to feel validated and valued, and to be heard and supported.
If you’d like to read more about mentee experiences, see these case studies. To read about how mentors also develop and benefit, read these case studies.
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