Successful Mentor-Mentee Relationships

Source: Monterail.com

Kellogg Insight features a very good article this week on how to be a better mentor (and mentee).   I found the tips to be quite useful.   One of the most interesting points made in the story centers on research by Kellogg Professor Brian Uzzi and his co-authors.  Here is the excerpt:

An analysis of the careers of more than 37,000 scientist mentors and mentees confirmed that having a mentor who is at the top of their game improves a mentee’s odds of ultimately becoming a superstar themselves by nearly sixfold.

But here’s something surprising. The study also suggests that the most successful mentees are those who go off to work in a different subject area, charting their own paths.

“When a student gets this ‘special sauce’ and they apply it to being a mini-me of their mentor, they still do well. But if they apply it to an original new topic of their own, they do even better,” Uzzi says.

This special sauce, the researchers argue, goes far beyond specific technical skills or subject-matter expertise, and includes tacit knowledge of how groundbreaking work is ideated and produced. This highlights the importance of mentors and mentees spending time and working through problems together, rather than simply ensuring that discrete skills are mastered.

This research strengthens advice offered later in the article by former IBM Chief Marketing Officer Diana Brink.   She argues that mentees need to own the agenda in these relationships.  They should be focused on how to secure the help and advice needed to achieve their goals, rather than simply trying to pursue the career path that the mentor may have chosen and attained quite successfully.  

The Essence of Excellent Mentorship

Source:  PxFuel

We've all heard the age-old advice: Find a terrific mentor.  Ask them good questions.  Learn from their successes and failures.  Gather feedback from them before making high-stakes decisions.  But what makes a terrific mentor?  Can we identify the "secret sauce" to excellent mentorship?

Brian Uzzi, Yifang Ma, and Satyam Mukherjee have conducted a fascinating large-scale study that may shed some important light on this question.  The scholars compiled a remarkable dataset of over 37,000 scientists and mentees.  They examined more than 1 million research papers produced by these scholars over a 57 year period.   Moreover, they looked at major prizes won by the researchers.  

They found something quite interesting.  The most successful protégés often make their make in subject areas distinct from those in which their mentors earned their stellar reputations.   Kellogg Insight described the research in a recent article as follows:

In some ways, this goes against conventional wisdom: students who are successful and carry on their mentors’ work are often perceived as rising stars. But in the long run, the most successful scientists are those who chart their own paths.

Uzzi and his colleagues try to identify what makes terrific mentors whose protégés soar.  They argue that the best mentors don't try to create a "mini-me" at all.   However, they do share a "secret sauce" with their mentees.  What is this secret sauce?   Again, here's an excerpt from the Kellogg Insight article about the research:

It’s clear that the best mentors pass on something that goes far beyond subject-matter expertise. (If that were the case, mini-me mentees would have been the most likely to succeed.)  Uzzi and his coauthors believe that what’s being passed between future prizewinners and protégés is tacit knowledge. Mentees aren’t just learning concrete skills from their mentors. They’re also picking up how their mentors come up with research questions, how they brainstorm, how they interact with collaborators, and so on—knowledge that is difficult to codify and often learned by doing.

That's the secret sauce.  Tacit knowledge.  In a mentoring relationship, focus on the critical skills that enabled the mentor to succeed, not just the subject matter expertise. 

Great Mentoring: Let the Protégé Lead

Source: Max Pixel

Diane Brink, IBM's former Chief Marketing Officer for Global Technology Services, shared her thougths recently with Kellogg Insights regarding the mentor-protégé relationship. How do you make this relationships as mutually beneficial as possible? She offers a number of good recommendations in an article titled, "5 Ways to Get the Most out of a Mentor–Protégé Relationship."  My favorite suggestion is: "Let the Protégé Lead."  Here is Brink's advice, as summarized by Kellogg Insights:

For protégés, commitment means more than sitting back and nodding in agreement with every suggestion the mentor makes. Mentees need to own the relationship.  Brink describes a protégé who would always send an agenda for their mentoring meeting a week beforehand: “I thought ‘Oh, my gosh. This guy is really thinking about not only how he can use my time effectively, but how he can really move the relationship to something that is going to be beneficial for him.’ That was pretty impressive.”

In any mentoring situation, it should be the protégé who sets the priorities. Brink likes to remind mentees that they really drive their own careers.  “You’re going to have a lot of people providing their point of view on what you should be doing with your career,” she says, “and it’s not their decision.”  Agreeing to make the mentee’s agenda a priority keeps him or her from being swayed towards a career path he or she may not be interested in following. And it takes pressure off the mentor to act as an all-knowing guru.  

The Dark Side of Board of Director Mentoring Relationships

Joann Lublin wrote a Wall Street Journal article this week titled, "Boards Try Buddy System to Get Newcomers Up to Speed."   Lublin describes how some boards have assigned mentors to new directors, so that experienced board members can help newcomers assimilate to the culture of the group.   Lublin offers the example of Carol Martz mentoring new director Amy Chang at Cisco Systems.  She explains, 

More boards are pairing new members like Ms. Chang with seasoned mentors like Ms. Bartz as they scramble to improve their oversight of management in the face of intensified investor scrutiny. Board buddies can help newcomers figure out the boardroom’s cultural norms, power brokers—and even the right place to sit.  Mentors make sure “you don’t come in as a bull in a china shop,” observes Steven R. Walker, managing director of the board services group at the National Association of Corporate Directors.

I certainly understand the importance of helping new directors learn the ropes when joining a board.  These mentoring relationships certainly appear to have a good intent.  However, I do have some worries about such systems.  What if the mentors provide the wrong message?  What if they encourage newcomers to refrain from challenging the status quo, expressing dissent, or asking the tough questions.  In the article, Martz acutally encourages Chang not to apologize for asking a challenging question.  However, some directors might provide very different advice.  They might promote norms that include conflict avoidance and deference to management.   Long-time directors might protect the harmony of the group, and in doing, send a signal that speaking up is not welcome.  Rocking the boat might not be the right strategy during your first board meeting. However, discouraging people from ever rocking the boat might also be a very dysfunctional dimension of some of these mentoring conversations.  

How Experts Can Train Novices More Effectively

Novices in many fields look to those with experience for mentorship, advice, and training.  It's quite natural for them to do so.  Unfortunately, the experts do not always make great teachers.   They can't empathize with the novices, and they sometimes have a hard time explaining how they learned to do what they do.   Scholars call this phenomenon the "curse of knowledge."  Think about the challenges some superstar athletes face when they try to coach others upon retirement.  Examples of those who struggled in this regard include Magic Johnson, Ted Williams, and Isaiah Thomas. 

Harvard doctoral candidate Ting Zhang has been conducting interesting research on how experts can break the "curse of knowledge."  She has focused on two strategies that could help.   First, experts can document their learning process while they are novices, and then look back on their notes when asked to provide coaching and advice to others.  Second, experts can "rediscover inexperience" by acting like a beginner again. 

In one study she asked undergraduates to record notes about their summer internships, and she collected the diaries.   Months later, they were asked to provide advice to others pursuing internships.  She gave one half of the experts access to their old notes, while the other half did not receive the diaries to review.   The new interns gave higher evaluations to the advice given by those who had reviewed their diaries. 

In a second study, she asked musicians to record themselves playing guitar.   One half of them could play as they wished. The other half were directed to play with their non-dominant hand.   Those in this second group felt more like beginners again, empathized more effectively with novices, and they gave more concrete and effective advice to beginners as well. 

Mentorship Mistakes

Fortune's Katherine Reynolds Lewis has written a good column titled "Five Mentor Mistakes to Avoid."    She makes two particularly strong points worth emphasizing here.  First, consider selecting a mentor who is not similar to you.  In many cases, people select mentors with whom they share some key things in common (perhaps educational background, gender, functional expertise, race).   However, Lewis suggests that picking someone similar to you may be a crucial mistake.  A mentoring relationship may deliver more fruit if you can learn from someone whose background and expertise enables them to offer you a different perspective.  Here's one excerpt:

When technology executive Sharon Meers, co-author of Getting to 50/50, was a vice president at Goldman Sachs, the women's network discovered that all the male vice presidents were playing basketball with the senior leaders. They asked the partners to create a program that would match women with senior men as mentors. A number of women who participated advanced to become managing directors.

Second, Lewis recommends thinking about mentoring as a two-way relationship.   I have written about that point several times, including on this blog.   Senior leaders should not only impart advice in a mentoring relationship.  They should use the opportunity to learn from their younger colleagues.  Making the mentoring relationship a two-way street can be incredibly beneficial.  

Being a Smart Protege

In this terrific Wall Street Journal column, Dawn E. Chandler, Douglas T. Hall and Kathy E. Kram offer eight tips for "being a smart protege."  We know that many young people are being encouraged to find a series of professional and personal mentors.   That advice begs the question:  How does one become a good protege?  What does it take to be successful in a mentoring relationship?  Chandler, Hall, and Kram offer some good recommendations.   In particular, I like their thoughts on how to "make it mutual."  Here's an excerpt:

Mentoring networks involve shared learning between two people. Too many people enter the relationships thinking of themselves as plebeian protégés who get support. Savvys, on the other hand, realize they have something to offer their mentors, too, and help them out whenever they can—which gives the other person a deeper vested interest in them.

Mentoring should be a two-way street.  Are you in an industry facing rapid technological change, or being disrupted by new internet-based technologies?  If so, senior executives may need to hear from young voices.  They may need to understand how millenials think, act, and consume products and services.   In some cases, firms will have established reverse mentoring programs, so that the veteran employees can learn from the millenials.  Suppose, though, that your firm has NOT embraced such a cutting edge program.  As a protege, you can still work on making a mentoring relationship mutual, by offering insights about societal and technological trends, and by letting the senior person "hear the voice of a millenial" on key issues.  In short, as a protege, you can become a "mini-focus group" for the senior executive. You can offer them insight into how millenials consume (or don't consume) the firm's products.  By offering that perspective, you can make a mentoring relationship mutual and provide real value to that mentor and the firm as a whole.  

Here's the key though:  Don't bring your opinions to the table.  Bring your data.  Bring insight into how millenials think and act, rather than offering your view on what the firm should do.   It can easily be considered brash and arrogant to start telling senior executives how to change the firm's strategy.  However, offering them insight into consumer behavior (just the facts) can help guide them to a rethinking of an outdated strategy, while avoiding a defensive response. 

The Protege Effect

Fast Company's Drake Baer has a new column titled, "Why Teaching Makes You Smarter."   In the article, he draws upon a terrific blog post by Annie Murphy Paul about how people learn.  Paul writes about the so-called "protege effect" that has been discovered by teaching and learning researchers:

Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In a phenomenon that scientists have dubbed “the protégé effect,” student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake. But how can children, still learning themselves, teach others? One answer: They can tutor younger kids. The benefits of this practice were indicated by a pair of articles published in 2007 in the journals Science and Intelligence. The studies concluded that first-born children are more intelligent than their later-born brothers and sisters and suggested that their higher IQs result from the time they spend showing their younger siblings the ropes.

Are there lessons here for business leaders?  Absolutely!   Mentoring, apprenticeship, and succession processes all involve the transmission of knowledge from expert to protege.  Most of the attention often focuses on the benefits to the recipient of this new knowledge.  This research demonstrates that a great deal of benefit exists for the expert as well.  They develop a better understanding of how to do their work by showing others the ropes.  I would argue that they can even become better leaders by reflecting on how they do their work, and helping to groom young future leaders of their organizations. 

Leadership Development Technique: Board Interaction

Adam Bryant recently interviewed Ilene Gordon, CEO of Ingredion, for his New York Times "Corner Office" column (an excellent weekly feature).   Gordon explained one technique she has used to further the development of young emerging leaders in her organization:

I use one dinner a year with my board to bring in young, high-potential managers. We have everybody give an “elevator speech.” You have three minutes to tell the board and other people in the room where you came from, the challenges you’re facing and how you’re trying to create value for the company. Everybody might want to take 15 minutes, but you have to be succinct.  This is part of what we’re looking for in people who have potential; it’s all about communication. What are the challenges you have, and you have three minutes to explain them, because there are 40 of you and we’re going to be here all night otherwise. And if you take somebody else’s time, that’s not respectful. It’s all about being succinct and articulate. 

Why do I like this technique?  First, it provides the board an opportunity to interact with people who may become senior leaders in the organization in the future.  They can begin to develop a relationship with these individuals.  Second, it challenges these young leaders' communication capabilities.  Can they be succinct, interesting, and engaging?   Can they create a powerful conversation based on their three minutes of remarks?  Third, it fosters the establishment potentially of some key mentoring relationships.   Not only may the young leaders gather advice and counsel from board members, but the board members may learn a great deal by hearing from young people who come from a different generation and may be more similar to the firm's actual core consumers.   Fourth, the invitation to present, in and of itself, offers a wonderful reward and recognition for these high performers.   Yes, they would love to be paid well.  However, these folks also care about their future career path.  Having this opportunity certainly will be welcomed and may help retain top young talent.  Finally, the board hears from voices other than senior managers about what is going on at the company. That can be important.  Senior managers naturally filter information as they present updates to the board.  Senior executives present information through their lens and perspective.  Having a different voice and perspective talk to the board can be helpful.