“Would you mentor me?” That question in an email from someone I’d never heard of or from jarred me. For someone who came up when I did, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was like a marriage proposal when you’ve never been on a date.
In those days, a mentor might seek you out and give some advice on a specific subject. That might be technical or it might be about corporate politics. If there was chemistry, a personal relationship would develop that could last for decades.
The term was based on the mythological character of Mentor, a family friend of Odysseus who watched over and guided his son, Telemachus. “Mentoring” was distinguished from simply giving advice or teaching by the personal relationship.
That was a good thing if a mentor found you, not so good if you had to figure everything out on your own. So companies started mentoring programs and assigned senior people as “mentors” to less experienced people.
The language changed, too. The term “protégé” for the person being mentored increasingly became “mentee.” Mentoring itself began to mean “giving advice,” with the relationship part optional.
In his Fortune article, “Why our thinking about mentoring is all wrong,” Scott Gerber says that “mentorship” has become a “generic synonym for giving advice”. Perhaps it’s time to return “mentoring” to the original sense and recognize that people can get advice in many ways.
Today, the network lets people reach out for advice as needed. Today there are a range of coaching services available on everything from how to install a pedestal sink to how to live your whole life.
Instead of worrying overmuch about “mentoring,” let’s concentrate on how to improve the ways people learn and develop on the job. Help them learn how to use the network and various forms of coaching to accelerate their learning and development. Make developing team members part of every boss’s job.
