Become a better mentor by asking yourself these questions

There’s a yawning gap between what academic mentors do and what their mentees need. The gap has only widened as higher education institutions and the people they serve change at a much faster pace than the academic norms and cultures therein. For example, today’s grad students and junior researchers are more likely to hail from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds than their mentors. They confront unprecedented personal and professional challenges, such as a multi-year pandemic, a widespread mental health crisis among grad students, political upheaval both on and beyond campus, and the further collapse of the academic job market in many disciplines. I have coached faculty who perceive that mentees resist their well-intentioned guidance. At the same time, many of the graduate students I’ve coached (at the same institution) tell me that they want and need mentoring. So what’s going on? 

Too many academic mentors still assume that mentoring is a form of apprenticeship. But how can you mentor someone who isn’t you – and who doesn’t want to become you? To address this question, I wrote a book called How to Mentor Anyone in Academia. It is, paradoxically, a “how-to” book that eschews advice-giving. Academic mentors have the potential to help mentees in many ways but so often they use the same two increasingly ineffective tools in their mentoring kit: role-modelling and advice-giving. For much of my first career as a university professor, I too relied on those tools. Now, as a professional certified coach, I can see a range of helping actions that may better serve a generation of mentees who might not “want to become you.” 

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What are these helping actions? A powerful, consistently underused one is the “powerful question”. Professional coaches don’t give advice, and their role is not to provide the answers. People – inherently gifted and resourceful – often need less external direction than they think. Often, once they encounter a “powerful question” they can answer it in ways that make the most sense for them and their unique context. This truth applies to our mentees, and it applies to mentors as well. 

One of the most famous mentoring moments in literature occurs in Letters to a Young Poet, in which Rainer Maria Rilke implores his young, certainty-seeking protégé to “love the questions”. So rather than frame my remaining advice to academic mentors in the form of pronouncements, I offer a set of questions that encompass some of the most pressing challenges today’s mentors face. Because no mentoring practice can flourish without committed time for reflection, I invite readers to reflect on these questions. Do I provide advice on these topics in the book? I do. However, if you immediately seek out somebody else’s answers to these questions, you might miss the larger point. I invite you to consider: 

• What does it mean for my role and purpose as a mentor if my mentees don’t want to follow in my footsteps? What does “mentorship” even mean if I can’t be a role model or advice-giver? 
• How can I create mentoring relationships that are safe and supportive, while continuing to challenge my mentee and hold them to high standards? 
• How can I motivate my mentee to do their best work when they seem mostly uninterested in the things that I value or aspire to? 
• How can I step back and allow my mentee to take a more proactive role in navigating challenges, setting goals and framing a vision for their way forward? 
• How can I avoid mentor burnout and the pressure to be all things to my mentee? How can I even find the time to mentor with thought and care when I have so many other commitments on my plate? 
• What is the relationship between the challenges I am facing as a mentor and the larger academic system in which I work? What aspects of the system do I have the power to influence or change? What kind of academic culture might better support me as an effective mentor? 

Among practitioners and researchers in mentoring, consensus has formed around some evidence-based strategies to address these challenges. Yet every one of these questions is complex, and complexity suggests there are no straightforward or one-size-fits-all answers. As a unique human being and an academic mentor within a particular institutional and disciplinary context, your charge is to find the answers that make sense for you and your mentees. 

This does not mean, however, that you are the answer for your mentee. Our mentees face a far more complex educational, social and geopolitical landscape than we did, and we must practice humility in the face of that reality. “Traditional” modes of academic mentoring that foreground the mentor, their status and their accomplishments above mentee needs are anything but humble. However you’d like to grow and change as a mentor, I invite you, in addition to an ongoing practice of reflection, to mentor with humility: talk less – much less! – listen more, ask more questions and let yourself be surprised by what you learn from your mentee. If you begin here, I promise you: you will be surprised by how helpful you can be.  

Maria LaMonaca Wisdom is assistant vice-provost for faculty advancement Duke University.

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