The elephant is in the room and now we can tiptoe around it carefully, mouths agape, or we can acknowledge its presence.
I hate organized mentoring programs.
There, I said it.
Student affairs, as a field, has a storied culture of mentoring. We mentor student leaders who express an interest in pursuing a career in the field. We mentor young professionals as they earn their stripes and join the ranks. We continue to validate the need for effective mentoring throughout careers.
Often this validation appears in the form of mentoring programs offered through professional organizations and formal outlets. It feels oddly like a dating service, filling out a vague, brief questionnaire and then being paired with someone with whom I’m supposed to develop a relationship of mutual learning and sharing. Worse yet, the mentoring programs often work under the assumption that one must be of a higher professional level to mentor someone else.
But is that how mentoring relationships that persist really develop? Can our development as professionals – as people – actually be reduced to six questions and an anonymous matchmaker?
I think about the mentoring programs for which I’ve signed up, both as a mentor and a mentee, and realize none has successfully produced a pairing where I felt sustained support or felt as though I could provide that to another person. Worse yet is having only 15 or 20 minutes laid out for us at a conference to even begin to navigate the waters of that conversation and then having the onus of finding a mutually acceptable communication plan for the duration.
Instead I reflect on my mentors and the variety of ways they’ve appeared in my life and how we’ve connected — the traditional routes such as jobs and internships; the soon-to-traditional routes of social media platforms. I reflect on the people who have told me I’ve served them as a mentor, identifying connection we shared that aided in their growth (and mine, too!).
In May, I asked the #SAchat community to share thoughts on mentoring in the comments of a blog post. As I reflected on what was shared, it validated my non-scientific believe that rarely have organized mentoring programs produced an actual mentoring relationship.
And so, as we start another year, this is my call to arms for our field:
Let’s stop forcing mentorship. Let’s stop creating false expectations of mentoring relationships and how they’re formed. Let’s stop using verbiage that makes it sound as though finding a mentor is as easy as completing an eHarmony dating survey. Let’s stop saying we need a mentor in a specific area or field and be open to mentors who are not what we expect.
Let’s focus on the tangible benefits of mentoring. Let’s replace the 30 minute faux mentoring at a conference with a brief session on intentional networking. Let’s better define mentoring and stop using the word so flippantly that it loses its meaning. Let’s be honest about who our true mentors are and not only how we connected the first time, but how we sustain those relationships.
