Mentoring is Planned Obsolescence

What do mentors do?

A lot of us who have never experienced good mentoring may have no idea what a mentor actually does.  In a future post, I will debunk some of the myths of mentoring.  For today, I want to offer some thoughts on what good mentors do, to show you that mentoring is absolutely something you can do.  (As always, if you want to try your hand at it, go to APSAnet and sign up!)

Good mentoring is all about planned obsolescence.  The purpose of a mentor is to become unnecessary to the mentee.  Think of it as like good parenting:  you want your child to grow up to be an adult who is not dependent on you anymore, but who knows when and how to call on you if they want your help.

Mentors help mentees to meet three kinds of need, with the goal of guiding mentees to be independent of the mentor.

Mentee Need #1:  Addressing Practical Concerns

This is probably what most people think of when they think of mentoring.  Depending on the mentee’s stage, practical concerns might include:

• The job market:  writing cover letters, doing interviews, organizing a CV, the ethics of going on the market while already employed
• Publications:  where to submit articles, how to respond to readers’ reports, how to write a book prospectus
• Time management:  how to make research progress while teaching full-time, how to make the most of research leave
• Teaching:  how to deal with problems in the classroom, how to design a syllabus, how to improve teaching skills
• Tenure:  how to put together tenure file materials, how to strategize publications for tenure

Mentors can either offer advice to their mentees directly, or encourage their mentees to seek advice from other sources.  There is no reason why a mentor needs to be an expert in a given area in order to mentor effectively:  a good mentor needs only to be able to point the mentee towards resources or people who can help them to get appropriate advice.  This brings us to the second need:

Mentee Need #2:  Developing a Broader Network

Most mentees will likely not identify this as one of their needs at first, but helping a mentee to develop a broader network is actually the way that a good mentor makes herself obsolete. 

It is highly unlikely that as a mentor you will be able to answer all of your mentee’s questions.  Nor should you, since the idea here is to gradually decrease your mentee’s reliance on you.  For example, if you are mentoring someone at a different institution, there will be institution-specific context you will not have or understand.  In such a case, you will want to help your mentee to identify people and resources at their campus that can help them to get the institution-specific guidance they need.  You might even encourage them to take on multiple mentors, some on campus, some off.

In some cases, mentors can help mentees build a network by introducing them to people they themselves know. However, this is not the primary way in which a mentor helps a mentee to build a broader network.  What it is really about is helping the mentee to identify for herself who she might turn to for support, advice, and/or mentoring – always with an eye towards her ultimately being able to get on without you altogether.

Mentee Need #3:  Transitioning to a New Career Stage

Graduate student mentees are in the process of transitioning from being students to seeing themselves as scholars and (ultimately) professors.  Junior faculty mentees are in the process of transitioning from being early career scholars to seeing themselves as senior scholars in the field.  The transitional needs mentees have will be very individual, and often quite personal.  This is an area of mentorship that some people will likely enjoy quite a bit, whereas others will not want to get quite so personal with their mentees.  It’s a good idea to be aware of whether you want to help your mentee address these kinds of needs or not.

The kind of things I am thinking of here have to do with a transition in one’s identity.  For one mentee, this may entail work on developing the self-confidence needed to fully embody a new role as a Ph.D., as a professor, or as an expert in a particular area of scholarship.  For another mentee, this might come out in terms of discussions about the relationship between personal and professional lives:  new career stages often involve moving away (literally and figuratively) from loved ones, or dealing with new relationship/family/career stresses, or the loneliness of a new institution and a new city.

So what do mentors do?

What mentors do is help mentees to meet some combination of these three needs.  As a mentor, you can decide for yourself whether you want to address all of these areas, or just a subset of them.  This may seem daunting – but just remember, a big part of being a mentor is helping your mentee to develop a network of supporters and mentors that extends well beyond you.  So if any of this seems beyond your reach, that’s actually good news:  that’s an area in which you already know your role will be to help your mentee to find someone else to support them.  By knowing your own limits, you are well on your way to planned obsolescence!