RWL #245
is mentoring a wave or a particle? and other great stuff!
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! My week’s activities really encapsulate what it is like to experience fall in New Hampshire: I went for a lovely sunrise paddle on Wednesday, and Saturday I brought out my leaf-blower for the first time this season.
I wrote about the three dimensions of mentorship in RWL 242 (personal support, career development, and job coaching), and I wrote about the difference between a mentee and a protégé in RWL 243. After taking a break last week to opine about inflation, I want to continue the mentorship theme. In particular, I want to talk about how mentoring is like both a wave and a particle - a little play on the nature of light. I see protégé as a sub-category of mentee, defined by both a focus on sponsorship (career development) and a long-term relationship. The classic definition of mentorship included the longitudinal relationship component - meaning that mentorship implies a relationship over time between a mentor and a mentee. If I ask you if you have (or had) a mentor, if you answer yes, you probably think of a person with whom you had a relationship for a period of time, not someone you met and had a one-time conversation with. In this sense, mentoring is like the wave conception of light - it is a continuous flow over time.
But what about the one-off conversations that you have with a leader? I think of senior leaders I knew in the Army - the good ones always took time to talk with younger soldiers and offered them advice and support. The relationship might not have been ongoing - it might have been a one-time thing - but the episode might have consisted of career advice, it might have been coaching on how to improve their performance, or it might have just been motivational support. In other words, the episode might have been focused on any one, or combination, of the mentoring dimensions. If it was a one-off encounter, you wouldn’t necessarily call it a mentoring relationship, because it lacks a longitudinal component, but mentoring did occur. In a sense the mentoring relationship is a series of mentoring episodes. A mentoring episode is an encounter where one or more of the mentoring dimensions is performed. In a mentoring relationship the mentor and mentee would perform the mentoring dimensions over time. Sometimes the episode might focus on job coaching, sometimes on career development, sometimes on personal support. The mentoring dimension performed would depend on the needs of the mentee. The mentoring relationship can be thought of usefully as a series of discrete episodes, and in this sense, mentorship is like a series of discrete particles - the other way physicists think about light.
Thus, the senior leader who walks through the halls of an organization and spends time with her/his people whom s/he does not have a close reporting relationship with, is doing mentoring. I don’t know that we would consider these occasional encounters engaged enough to call them a mentoring relationship - but where we would draw the line is certainly imprecise, and probably has more to do with impact than raw counts of episodes.
A mentor mentors. That may sound a bit redundant, but think about it for a moment. What makes someone a mentor? It is the fact that they engage in mentoring episodes, whether those episodes are with a long-term mentee or protégé, or whether they are with relative strangers. My favorite artist-philosopher, Austin Kleon, says,
“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.”
Wave or particle - the mentor is light. It is why every leader should be engaged in mentoring.
What are your thoughts on mentorship and mentoring episodes?
Now, to the links!
Read
What: Evil HR Lady, If You Can’t Find Good Employees, It May Not Be a Labor Shortage–It May Be You (2 minute read)
Why: Short post from my favorite HR blog.
“People are looking for work. They aren’t looking to be exploited. They aren’t looking for lying liars.”
The meme at the beginning is priceless.
**
What: The New Yorker, It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations” (15 minute read)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-generations
Why: I remember reading critiques in the 90’s of my generation, Gen X, the so-called “slacker” generation, and thinking, this is not who I am. The movie Reality Bites was supposed to capture the oeuvre of my generation. I hated that movie and the idiotic, self-indulgent characters who did not resemble me or my friends at all. As a result, I have always been skeptical of Generational generalizations. So this anti-generational article appealed to me. The author is a bit too critical of qualitative research, but he does highlight that if you speak primarily to young people who go to elite universities, you are not going to get a representative picture of a “generation”.
I liked this explanation of generation thinking:
Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.
There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today.
This is a great summary of the problem of generalizing on one dimension of a person’s experience:
Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.
It’s a nice critique.
**
Watch
What: Conor Neill, 11 Great Questions for Life (3 minutes)
Why: These are great questions. Ask them of yourself, ask them of someone you respect. Ask them of your mentor. Well worth 3 minutes.
**
What: TEDx, Gerd Gigerenzer, How do smart people make smart decisions? (19 minutes)
Why: Gigerenzer explains why rational decision making, as characterized by doing things like listing pros and cons, does not work well in a complex world. It works well when the future is predictable and it is just a matter of calculating probabilities. In reality, the future is uncertain (the probabilities are unknowable), and so we need to develop heuristics (rules of thumb). It’s a fundamentally conservative position that I ascribed to wisdom.
**
Listen
What: Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Dorie Clark (55 min)
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dorie-clark/id328074695?i=1000536016220
Why: Dorie Clark made her name in the coaching world by writing about personal brands. I’ve written about that in the past (here, here, and here), and I have some thoughts on that, but I’ll save them for another time.
This interview is pretty wide-ranging, as Millman always is with her guests, but I really liked the part where Clark talked about saying yes and saying no. She argues that when you are young you should say yes to every opportunity. When you are young, you don’t know what you are good at and you don’t know where any given opportunity will take you. But as you get older and develop experiences and a network, you have to become more strategic about what you say yes to, and start to say no a lot more. Strategy is in essence defining what are the few important things that I am going to say yes to, so that I can say no to everything that distracts from the few important things. This approach is what good firms do, and it is what people who accomplish important things do.
There is a lot more in the podcast, so the whole thing is worthwhile.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend?
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
"Were there none discontented with what they have, the World would never reach anything better." - Florence Nightingale