Tuesday, June 27th, 2006...2:15 pm
Mentors and Mentoring
I had a great session with one of my mentors this afternoon. I was bouncing some ideas off of him about career development. If you are like me, you have a lot of things on a professional level that you want to bounce off a trusted friend with more experience. Or maybe you just need some good ideas.
In my case, it is time to have that annual discussion with my manager about my career development. In this exercise, I take inventory of my roles in the department, and my goals related to those roles and my personal aspirations. Any leader will tell you the best approach (in corporate America) is to make sure that your personal aspirations stay in line with the organization’s vision. Your professional development depends heavily on your contribution to the organization’s success. These were the issues I discussed with my mentor this afternoon.
A mentor can be a great asset when it comes to setting personal goals, especially on a professional level. A mentor can validate your thinking, or help you stretch your paradigm to bring out even better results.
But what is a mentor?
Merriam-Webster Online defines a mentor as “A trusted counselor or guide. A tutor or coach.”
The word “Mentor” originally comes from Homer’s epic The Odyssey. When Odysseus went to fight in the Trojan War, he handed the reigns of his kingdom to Mentor. One of Mentor’s most important duties was to oversee the education of the king’s son, Telemachus.
F. John Reh tells us..”A mentor is an individual, usually older, always more experienced, who helps and guides another individual’s development. This guidance is not done for personal gain.”
Jason Womack recently challenged my thinking about who I have on my team. It is important to have people in our lives, at all levels, that challenge us, affirm us, and bring out the best in us.
My mentor is certainly a key player in my professional team.
- Jason
3 Comments
June 28th, 2006 at 3:42 am
Jason:
I totally agree with you. Mentors are incredibly important not only to have these guiding conversations, but most often, they are the best people to seek advise, when in adversity. There are two things that I would like to share though:
The first is how to choose the right mentor. Not sure, if you would get this luxury all the time, but if given, the mentor should be chosen carefully.
Second is, where to draw the line, on how much we share/depend on the mentor. I have many a time, seen a person, being stereotyped as a boot-licker, when all the person was ‘thinking’ was, havng a good relationship with his mentor.
It would be awesome if you guys could come up with some guidelines/recommendations to choose a mentor (for those who dont already have one), and where to draw the line.
GCM
June 28th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Jason,
Very interesting post. I agree with GCM as well. For me, Mentorship is an interesting concept directly linked to success in graduate-level studies. In many ways, I often feel the advisor role as mentor is often the breakdown in one’s ability to grow as a researcher. I’ve worked with two advisors now. One who was primarily concerned with how well he was perceived and disregarded the difficulties of his students, and one who spent untold days in teaching students one on one as much as they needed. Very interesting to contrast these two and their ability to manage and mentor their students. If I have time late in the week, I’ll try and think more on this and post- if I do, I’ll send another message on this comment-thread (so don’t feel the need to go looking for it now.
)
One of the issues I’ve had with mentorship is that it seems to me to be a lot like a friendship in some ways… I had an aquaintance who was sure we were “best-friends”- it was almost as if the friendship was *forced*- our pastor had to explain that this level/type of friendship grows and isn’t something you can make by small-groups or a few outings… I feel the same way about mentors. If it isn’t the growth of a friendship chosen by the mentoree and mentor, it will be a forced, business-like relationship which will utlimately not reach the same heights as a deeper relationship might. Although, I think there’s worth in both levels.
So, I guess it may depend on what type of mentor we’re talking about… and what level of depth. In our department, women and minorities were able to link into a network of mentors from past students (not sure why this wasn’t offered to the rest of the student-body)- it appeared that sometimes the relationships were deep and useful, and sometimes the relationships were topical. Either way, however, when a problem was met, often the mentor had useful information for the student.
Ok, without going too long winded here- I think the current issues with higher-education (graduate-level) can be solved by a 2-person approach. The student would be under a PI, who would be the “Scientific Advisor” as well as under a “Graduate Mentor”. There would be a check-and-balance in the two-prof. approach, one would be concerned with the student’s scientific discovery process and one would be concerned with the student’s personal productivity and accountability. There would be little to no interaction between Prof. 1 and Prof 2 except for reviews of the other’s interaction with the student, and overseeing by the dept. head.
Alright, better run- chat with everyone soon- sorry, Jason, you just touched a nerve here for me- please let me know any and all comments!
August 14th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Three Duties of a Mentor…
Jesse Brown A mentor, like a good Board of Directors, offers the CEO (that would be you, the mentee) three talents: Contacts Consulting Capital Black Belt Productivity reminds us that, The word “Mentor” originally comes from Homer’s epic The……
Leave a Reply