Successful People Never Reach Their Goals Alone
Mentors help new people in a field grow into it, learn, and become experts themselves, and there is lots of research that supports this. John Crosby called mentoring “a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.” Mentors see the strength and talent in you, listen to your hopes and dreams, and help you reach your full potential. Good ones also tell you when your plans are totally unrealistic and you need a bit of a check to that ambition. In short, good mentors foster sustainable, healthy growth. So, we all need them, right? And we should go out and get them.. or so the common wisdom says.
“I encourage all of you to seek out teachers and mentors that challenge you to think for yourself and guide you to find your own voice” — Renee Olsted
Lovely sentiment. Beautiful really. But unrealistic for so many of our students and professionals. How do you begin to ask someone to be a mentor? Who gets to do this asking? I have reflected periodically over the years on the privilege I have growing up in a middle class academic family, going to great schools like Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, and coming from a solid academic “family” (headed by Gregory Abowd). This combination has opened numerous doors to me, including supplying me with ample mentors. I do what I can to repay it, but the people I tend to mentor, outside of my own students, come from similar piles of privilege. They are in my academic family or they come from other well-known academic families, and I have been asked to look out for them. Rarely do I get a call just asking for help from someone unknown to me. When I do, they are nearly always male and nearly always white or Asian. Occasionally, I get a call from a parent who lives in the nearby area, is affluent, and is looking for opportunities for their child. In other words, the calls and emails I get are to support people who are a part of the dominant majority groups in computing. And to be honest, when I do, it’s weird, we often haven’t connected in any meaningful way, and I can’t spend much time with them if at all. I am just too busy. We are all. Just. Too. Busy.
This is a problem.
This is a major problem.
The people who need mentoring the most often don’t have access to the informal mentor networks they need.
And so we have formal mentoring. Every new professor in Informatics at UCI gets two faculty mentors. Every PhD student gets an advisor from day one as well as formal mentoring from the DECADE mentor, Vice Chair for Graduate Affairs, and graduate counselors in student affairs. And every MHCID student this year had two mentors who work as professionals in the industry.
I have literally never heard anyone say mentoring is bad. (Well, there was that one paper in 1997). So, we won’t belabor that point here. I do, however, frequently hear that mentoring programs are bad, or at least ineffective. Before I get into why I don’t agree (and why the scholarship in the area backs me up on this), let’s talk a bit about why formal mentoring programs even exist in the first place.
Formal mentoring programs arose around the same time as affirmative action and workplace equity issues began to gain traction. Mentoring programs were seen as a way to attract and retain talented underrepresented groups. Research during this period showed that these programs were most effective when people were mentored by people like them. This could mean a lot of things, but in the context of trying to attract and retain underrepresented groups, this usually meant matching mentors by gender or racial and ethnic origins. And this has worked… to a degree.
Research indicates mentoring is an overall positive experience. Overall, mentors report enjoying the networking and sharing of ideas, reflection, professional development, and personal satisfaction. At the same time, mentees tend to report feelings of improved support, empathy, and encouragement, as well as positive experiences with feedback, critique, and positive reinforcement. This is not to say mentorship has no problems, but overall, it works.
But nobody likes a blind date.
It’s true. Formal mentoring relationships can feel a bit like a blind date. When the person mentoring you is a superior (as is the case for our faculty or PhD students) or someone you might want to hire you one day (as is the case for our MHCID students), it can be really hard to build the trust you need and be vulnerable in front of a mentor. There are, however, structured ways to build trust. Start with this book to begin understanding trust, mentoring, and improving your organization’s culture: New directions in mentoring: Creating a culture of synergy.
From the mentor’s viewpoint, talking regularly to someone you barely know can be a chore. For me, a deep introvert, its one more exhausting hour out of my life, and I try to use all that social energy for teaching classes, attending meetings, and so on. When both mentor and mentee work for the same organization, some shared vision of wanting the organization to succeed might carry this through, but beyond that, mentors tend to volunteer their time through a combination of altruism and spirit of volunteerism coupled with an interest in the mentee on a personal and professional basis. How do we foster this interest in a formal matched program?
One of the things we can do of course is train the mentors. Many mentoring programs fail on the basis of not having helped the mentors do the work they have volunteered to do. I must admit, we failed on this in our first year in the MHCID program. We identified a superstar group of mentors, but we didn’t give them much in the way of training. In response, we have created a mentoring manual specific to our program and set up some training for next year. This should be a benefit not only to the specific mentoring relationships in our program but also to these professionals more broadly.
Mentorship programs also benefit from good matching systems. This is one thing I am pretty proud of in our program. No one gets it completely right every time, but we did a pretty good job. We did this by giving students the linkedin profiles of every mentor who volunteered and the mentors a survey asking what kinds of students they want to mentor, feel most comfortable mentoring, and so on. I am happy to say that though we of course had some mismatches, overall our students and mentors both report being happy with their relationships. As our program grows, this process will be a struggle to scale, but it’s worth it given the importance of the match.
I keep hearing about mentoring relationships that fizzle. So why bother?
This is the ultimate question, isn’t it? If we accept that many formal mentoring relationships either never get off the ground or fizzle, why bother?
First, some mentoring is better than no mentoring. There is indisputable research on this. Informal mentoring is often best in terms of outcomes, but it is limited to those with access to these mentors. Formal mentoring can be just as good, but it requires the kind of good matching and practices described above, and even when it’s not good, it’s better than nothing. Better than nothing is not exactly a stellar endorsement, but guess what, most of our underrepresented colleagues and students are getting no mentoring at all outside of formal programs. So, it matters.
Second, informal mentoring can grow out of formal mentoring. This happens in several ways. Sometimes the relationship isn’t quite working, but the mentor knows someone who would be a great fit. They make an introduction, and a new relationship is born. Sometimes, the mentor is providing such valuable advice that a mentee suggests to a friend to seek this person out. And again, a new relationship is born. Sometimes, the relationship fizzles but years later is rekindled and grows from that original foundation built in the formal program.
Finally, formal mentoring allows for follow-up by the organization itself. Hopefully, every one of our MHCID students is getting mentoring beyond the two professionals from our program. However, I have no way to know and track this. And even if I could manage to collect the information from our students as to who all their mentors are, me reaching out to those folks to find out how its going would be awkward and inappropriate. In our formal mentoring program I can email the mentors, and I do. We periodically survey all our mentors, but more importantly, when we have a student who is struggling I reach out. Additionally, I have had mentors reach out to me to let me know that there is something not going as well as it could be in the program. This has proved valuable in getting students additional support and in getting more background information from them on how our program is running. More data, more understanding, and better iteration on the program, both the mentoring aspects and others, improves things significantly.
If you care about diversity in tech, if you care about bringing up those who haven’t had the same resources and opportunities as you, you simply must care about formal mentoring programs.
Can they be better? OF COURSE! And I am grateful to the scholars researching how to do so. We will be making substantial changes to our mentoring programs at all levels as we grow and develop them. We learned over time to supply two mentors, because one relationship might not work out. We will be incorporating more structured trust building efforts this year. I am sure even more things will emerge over time to make our efforts even more impactful. We will continue to improve, because we must.
So, how can we do better?
For mentors, take those calls. Sometimes they will be from people like me, with significant resources and social capital, asking for you to help a friend or student. I had three calls of this sort this week, two inbound to me and one outbound from me. But sometimes, these will come from someone unexpected who really needs you. Consider taking the time for that person too.
For mentees, be respectful of your mentor’s time and resources but don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. Mentors aren’t mind readers and can only help when they have been asked.
For everyone, remember that mentoring is not just about any one thing. Yes, mentors should help with job placement, but this is by far not the only thing they can or should help with. Mentors often provide psychological and social support, serve as role models for professionalization, and connect people within their networks. At any given time, a mentoring relationship might be built on one or multiple of these pillars. And sometimes the roles even reverse. I have taken calls from former mentors who now want my advice, and I have made a lot of calls to former students who now give me advice. Mentorship, formal or informal, is essential and lasts a lifetime.
