Show Notes
In this first VacationCast episode of Season 3, with Andy out, Mon-Chaio dives into the complexities of mentorship, particularly within workplace relationships. He explores the differences between peer-to-peer mentoring and manager-direct report mentoring, the potential pitfalls of using the term ‘mentorship’ for career development or performance feedback, and the impact of these practices on genuine employee growth and leadership development.
References
- Season 1, Episode 13: “The Feedback Fallacy?”
- Season 2, Episode 41: “Improvement Beyond Podcasts – The Art of Deliberate Practice”
- Season 2, Episode 16: “Misleader Majority”
Transcript
Mon-Chaio: Welcome everyone, and thanks for tuning in. Since Andy is on an airplane in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere, I’ll be your host today for the first VacationCast episode of Season 3. For our new listeners, VacationCasts are shorter episodes where we discuss topics that may not be a great fit for a full episode. Whether that’s because it’s a riff on an unrefined idea, or because it’s a bit tangential to what we normally discuss. Now, occasionally this will generate ideas for a full episode, or multiple episodes, as it did last season for our “From Garage to Global” five-part series.
For today’s episode, I thought we could explore the topic of mentorship, specifically in the context of mentors and mentees in a workplace relationship. The mentor-mentee relationship could be peer to peer, as when someone from a peer team mentors you, or – what I find more interesting to discuss – manager-direct report, where your manager is mentoring you as part of the responsibilities for developing your career. Now, when I think about that latter case, I sometimes think that it shouldn’t be called mentorship; maybe career development or performance feedback are more accurate phrases to describe this activity. But the reason I want to continue to use the phrase mentorship here is because that’s what the industry uses, especially when they’re talking about manager responsibilities, like in a job description, or traits that make a good leader, often seen in career-ladder rubrics.
So why do companies, and people at large, think it’s important for leaders to be mentoring the direct reports? For my perspective, the answer is pretty easy. It’s because the leader’s job is to grow a high performing organization. And the only way to do that at scale is to continually improve both the people and the processes … now, I’m leaving out culture intentionally here, but the people and the processes that make up the organization. But here’s where I think we run into a bit of trouble with the term mentorship. When I think about the quote-unquote ideal form of mentorship, I Imagine a selfless mentor dedicating their time and energy to improve the life of their mentee. In a manager-direct report relationship however, the mentor is no longer selfless. Their goal is to elicit behavioral changes that improve the performance of the organization. But that goal is more often than not at odds with what’s best for the mentee long term. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that organizations don’t have the patience to reward true growth.
We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about what the research suggests is required to grow skills sustainably: tactics such as presenting a generic thought model and guiding the mentee into aligning their experiences into the model; or the importance of deliberate practice, where you – in part – practice a concrete skill in a repeatable environment; or the criticality of context-specific learning rather than simply looking to fill the quote-unquote empty vessel of the mentee with the mentor’s adjacent-context experiences. Two key similarities across all of these tactics are the need for time and the fallacy of specificity, that is, often, the more specific the guidance on how to correct behavior, the less impactful it actually is. And yet, in almost all manager-direct report mentoring relationships I’ve witnessed, the primary interaction is the manager telling their direct report what went wrong, and how to fix it for next time.
Now, when the goal is to make sure something gets executed to a timeline, this is very useful. The manager has identified some behavior that is preventing the team goal from being achieved, and the manager knows what behavior they expect in order to best achieve said goal. But as useful as this ritual is to goal attainment, it is equally not useful for actual employee skill growth. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve covered a lot of this previously, so if you’re interested in the research and science, go give those episodes a listen: Season 1, Episode 13 on “The Feedback Fallacy” and Season 2, Episode 41 on “Deliberate Practice” are good places to start.
Yet, despite all of this overwhelming evidence, it is still a prevalent ritual and it is widely termed mentorship. And I think this is problematic for a couple of reasons. First is that it presents the illusion of growth. At most companies, people are promoted based on project execution. Even those companies that purport to evaluate both the “what”, as well as the “how”, almost always lean more on the “what”. Which makes sense, given that the “what” translates directly to the bottom line in a way that “how” does not. And companies and their managers then espouse to employees that promotion equals growth. So if you’re being promoted, you must be growing, right? The second reason is even more troubling. I believe this type of quote-unquote mentoring is contributing to the lack of truly strong leaders in the industry. When the mentoring that you receive is always about a specific tactic to fix a specific situation to achieve a goal that’s important to the company, you end up with a vast toolbox, but no map or strategy. So the majority of leaders just pull tools out of their toolbox at random. And if it doesn’t work to solve their current problem, out comes a different tool, one at a time, with the hope that the next one will work better than the previous. We’ve covered other factors that also contribute to the lack of competent leaders in Season 2, Episode 16, “Misleader Majority”, if you’re interested in giving that episode a listen.
There is definitely room for even more discussion and exploration of this topic, but instead of me just talking and making this episode longer than it needs to be, I’d love to hear from all of you. Is this something that you’ve experienced in your career? Do you have thoughts on how to go about changing mentoring behavior in organizations? Or do you believe that I have it completely backwards, and this type of mentorship is valid and useful? Whatever your thoughts, share them with us at hosts@thettlpodcast.com. That’s hosts with an ‘s’. If there’s lots of interest and fierce debate, that could even prompt us to record a longer episode on this topic.
Well, that’s it for the first VacationCast of Season 3. Andy will be back next week when we’ll dive into a tool, similar to the BART tool in our very first episode, that you can use to analyze organizational dysfunction or ineffectiveness. We hope you’ll tune in then, but till next time, be kind and stay curious.
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