A Constellation of Mentors: On Disruptive, Indigenous and Virtual Models of Mentorship

There are two types of mentorship discussed in the literature I reviewed, formal and informal. The literature uses the terms 'functionalist' and 'relational' mentoring. Functionalist mentoring is very 'old school', where there is a formal hierarchal distance between mentor and mentee. The relational model assumes that both parties are equals in the knowledge and value they bring to the relationship. The trends in the research show that the functionalist model is on its way out, if not already gone in today's business world. There is also mentioned in the literature of 'groups as mentors' relationships, which points to the functions of a Communities of Practice, in some way. While valuable to think of different models of mentoring, I think the model should be kept to a 1:1 ratio. To expand that we run the risk of making every relationship mentoring and in making it everything you run the risk of making it nothing. That is not to say that one person cannot have multiple mentors, which I think is a necessary part of this conversation - the actual relationship though should have its effectiveness measured along the 1:1 ratio.

Reverse mentoring, as I found it in the literature, is a problematic term. The term 'reverse mentoring' assumes the functionalist model, where only senior members of the industry or in a firm are qualified to fill the role of mentor. This presumes that they can do no wrong due to their longevity. There was a quote in the readings that resonated with me specifically, from my past life as a skilled tradesman, that I think helps reveal some of the problems with the term and the thinking that underlies it.

In the Workplace Mentoring article, in discussing knowledge sharing relationships in an industrial scale bakery:

"bakery workers were resistant to safety training when they saw that safe practices were overridden by supervisors in a hurry to meet production targets."

In my past life, I have seen this same dynamic in practice and found myself often in the role of 'reverse mentor', but in this case reverse mentoring might also be called 'disruptive mentoring'. In my work as a skilled tradesman, a handful of the senior mechanics I worked with scoffed at safety protocols and rationalized the way they had been enculturated to work. I would always disrupt this cycle by using the tools of a mentor;

 Humor 

Real life examples 

Stories 

and Teasing;

 in an effort to get my senior coworkers to work safer. 

The term 'reverse mentoring' is tied to a definition of mentoring that aligns with age. Disruptive mentoring is a better description of the act and better defines mentoring in general by removing the age = experience = a better way, path of thought. This is an unproductive and sometimes dangerous generalization. Disruptive Mentorship can also be used to describe non-traditional methods of mentoring, such as virtual or online mentoring. We could define it all as just 'mentoring', but that swings the pendulum too far in the other direction and closer to the 'everything is mentoring' mindset. Reverse mentoring needs a name to differentiate it, but the name it currently is loaded with the old school functionalist definition of what a mentoring relationship should be. The above situation though, also reveals the two-way knowledge transferral that takes place in mentoring. The aforementioned communication skills I mentioned, the ones I used to disrupt the unsafe practices of my former coworkers, were learned from previous mentoring relationships I had experienced. On the other side of the spectrum, one of my most successful (and eminently safe) mentors was the first Chief Engineer I worked under, a former submariner, that would use stories and repetition to teach me the appropriate communication skills and work ethic to progress in my career. Workplace communication skills are a prerequisite for both sides of the mentoring process. This is true for both face-to-face and online communication. 

The communication taught to a mentee through observation should have its differences from traditional training models highlighted. From the research:

"the general practice by vocational trainers regarding literacy in training is to circumvent potential or actual learning issues workers might have, through strategies that include simplifying resources, using pictures, repeating and writing answers for trainees to copy."

This is an important point, the mentor's job is to bring the mentee to the same level of literacy and skill. Using educational techniques that presuppose an inability or unwillingness to learn (due to time spent, priorities, etc.) is more akin to a Fordian model of assembly line worker 'training'. 

This is what makes mentoring different from other models of education, the understanding that this education will not be a spoon-fed or passive training situation, will be challenging for both parties, and has the end goal of mastery of a certain set of skills.

The second, and really what I consider the truest mentoring relationship I've engaged in, was with the Bad River Ojibwe elder I learned Anishinabemowin (the Ojibwe language) and Ojibwe culture from during my undergraduate career. He taught me the benefits of teasing and humor associated with correcting behavior in a mentor / mentee relationship.

The Workplace Mentoring review is a fascinating article and I highly recommend it, as it talks at length about indigenous Māori methods of mentoring, and the differences between the indigenous model and the Western (what it calls Pākehā) model. Indigenous peoples transferred knowledge through mentoring practices developed over thousands of years, it is a rich field for techniques and ideas that often prove to be relevant and superior to Western models that are only just over one hundred years old, at the most. I love the below quote because it reveals the incredible time-depth that the mentoring process actually has:

"In Homer‟s Odyssey, Mentor was a wise and faithful advisor, entrusted to protect Odysseus' son, Telemachus, while Odysseus sailed against Troy. Perhaps Mentor, offering his assistance as a more experienced friend, would have been hailed by Māori as possessing the Māori principle of āwhinatanga. In traditional European/Pākehā workplaces the mentor/mentee relationship came to have a power dimension, as '… an older, powerful member of an organization who provided career and psychosocial support to a younger, less powerful person'. Modern day workplace mentors tend to develop the same kind of relationships with mentees. They tend to work with less powerful individuals (in terms of organizational status and income) in order to help them fit in to the norms and values of the workplace and to develop their formal and informal learning."

Modern business has changed the original definition of the mentor / mentee relationship to fit a power structure, to the detriment of the practice. Re-appropriating the term to the original indigenous context is necessary to ensure that mentoring is a productive and relevant practice in the 21st century workplace. Diving a bit further into the Pākehā vs Māori definitions:

"two definitions of mentoring, or Āwhinatanga. This is followed by an account of the origin of the term, and a discussion of its past and present use.

[Western] Mentoring is planned early intervention designed to provide timely instruction to mentees throughout their apprenticeship, to shorten the learning curve, reinforce positive work ethics and attitudes, and provide mentees with role models.

[The Māori definition of mentoring is in the word for it, Āwhinatanga:] Awhina. v.t. Assist, benefit, befriend."

To assist and befriend - I think that is a much better working model for mentoring and the one I will use as my definition for my work towards those ends. It does not presuppose age or tenure as a qualifying factor, it eliminates the distance between the two engaged in the relationship. And, true to any good design, it is powerful in its simplicity.

With our working definition of mentoring in hand, lets see how 'reverse mentoring' fits. This term is used throughout the literature for this post and presupposes that new skills being brought in should also be recruited for the program as a form of 'disruptive' mentoring. This program can be designed to facilitate cross-department or disciplinary knowledge sharing. In the article 'Reverse Mentoring at Work', the aforementioned 'age-based view' (boy, I'm using a lot of 'speech marks' in this article, that says something about the subject in itself) is brought up:

"The age-based view builds on [the] idea that different age groups recall different events as formative experiences, which create collective memories or mental models representing shared attitudes and values. The cohort-based view is rooted in social identity theory, such that members share a collective identity with the cohort group based on common experiences and outcomes for individuals..."

The age-based view and cohort-based view are an important dichotomy and a way to break down the age-based generational model. In a professional services firm, the cohort-based model will be strong, as individuals are socialized in school in a very specific way. 

Disruptive mentoring is a way to bake new generational traits into a firm's culture. 

The Great American Recession created a generational gap, as it was difficult for a nearly a decade for many professional services firms to hire new graduates and those that were of the new generation were the first to be let go after the recession took hold, leaving only the baby-boomers and to a lesser extent the Gen-Xer's to 'helm the ship'. 

This makes reverse (or disruptive) mentoring all the more important as the practice helps to return a firm affected by the Great Recession to a normal balance of generational shift. 

While the article calls out the issues with an age-based view, it double-backs and uses some equally problematic generational stereotypes:

"In the workplace, millennial employees tend to be more assertive with a desire to “be heard” and to have an immediate impact. Reverse mentoring capitalizes on these values by giving young employees the responsibility of developing their mentees’ skills. In traditional mentoring relationships, for mentors “a primary benefit is the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment from fostering the development of a younger adult”. While this may benefit reverse mentees, they will also learn how their millennial mentors prefer to teach and learn, as well as the way they approach work and life generally."

Perhaps a traditional mentoring structure that is based on tenure might be a better model, perhaps not. For the sake of argument, let’s pull on this thread a bit. Let’s imagine that those at the firm from 1 to 5 years are mentored by individuals that have been there 6 to 10 years, and on from there. This might naturally limit any severe age / generational gap between mentor / mentee (but not necessarily) and allow for an environment more conducive to a formal vs disruptive mentoring two-way relationship. 

The larger the gap, the more dramatic the (positive) effects, but also the more risk is incurred that the relationship will fail. 

This approach is not a panacea to defining humans by a 'generational' model, but it at least removes the emphasis on age. While the language is problematic in the article, the thoughts behind its points are sound. It defines reverse mentoring as having a role different from traditional mentoring. For instance:

"It is likely that reverse mentoring relationships, particularly due to the technological savvy of millennial mentors, will benefit from the use of a combination of face-to-face meetings and electronic media. As part of reverse mentoring, organizations should encourage the discussion of current media communication trends and their effectiveness among mentors and mentees."

This is an important point, if the goal of 'reverse' mentoring is to increase the knowledge base on how to use technologies, it makes sense to conduct the reverse mentoring process via the medium of these technologies. For instance, a senior employee engages in a reverse mentoring relationship with a younger employee, part of that exercise is to promise to communicate via a social media (perhaps even a [relative] safe zone, like a corporate social intranet) platform once a week for the duration of the mentoring.

This seems like a good place to pivot our discussion to how technology can impact / change the mentoring process, on the whole. I'll return to the idea of a many mentors to one mentee relationship. This is another disruption of the model but one that does not necessarily break our 1:1 ratio, because the mentee works with each mentor on a 1:1 basis, there just happens to be many mentors to work with. This is distinct from a Community of Practice in that a CoP is a community dynamic learning environment, or a many to many ratio. To further clarify this definition I'd like to offer a quote from the article 'Online mentoring and computer-mediated communication' (forgive some of the antiquated terms, the article is from the far distant technological past of the year 2002), in referencing different types of ongoing mentor/mentee relationships:

"a [mentee's] constellation of mentors is referred to as developers and these constellations of mentoring relationships could vary by diversity and strength."

I like the metaphor, a 'constellation of mentors', because it suggests guidance through insight and interstitial knowledge rather than overt instructions, and the experience of being in multiple mentoring relationships at once and how this creates a synergistic experience.

The research into online-only mentoring relationships succeeds in generating more questions than answers. For instance:

"some [mentees] believe that never meeting with their coach face-to-face allows for a more honest and objective relationship"

I find this to be an interesting observation, does the quality of interaction change in an online environment as opposed to face-to-face? 

In a blended mentoring environment (online and face-to-face), do opposing characteristics stay unchanged or are they weighted to one side or the other? Similarly:

"[virtual] relationships may take more time to develop, but with adequate time, communicators can develop strong relational links. The Internet is a social medium allowing for the development of interpersonal relationships, including the benefits and risks inherent in any relationship."

In the 21st century, do we still think that purely virtual mentoring might need to be established over a longer period of time or marked with more frequent contact than a face-to-face process? Is it possible to forge deeper relationships online than face-to-face? 

Exploring these questions and the worth of online interaction in general should be one of the overarching goals of a modern mentoring program. Digital immigrants (those born before the Netscape Browser and America Online) do not have a perspective that allows for meaningful online relationships to the same degree as digital natives. Developing this perspective is important for success in the 21st c. workplace. There needs to be the ability to exchange sensitive information privately - such as a complaint about a co-worker, in the virtual environment - as this is a core function of the face-to-face mentoring dynamic. This can be done face-to-face and the mentor can dispense advice in a non-judgmental way and the mentee can be satisfied that there is no record of the exchange other than verbal. How will information like this be conveyed online, where everything is logged and archived in perpetuity? Does this change the nature of the relationship to the point to where it can no longer be considered a mentor / mentee relationship?

Some of the aspects of a traditional mentoring relationship do not change online, however. Take the following quote, for instance:

"Online counselors have found that the lack of access to non-verbal cues can lead to misunderstandings or even inaccurate diagnoses and hence poor advice . Online mentors are likely to find the absence of non-verbals challenging as well."

I don't see this as a challenge to overcome but one of the principal reasons to engage in a virtual mentoring relationship, to learn how communication is done well in this new medium. This is a clear job for a 'disruptive' mentoring dynamic, teaching those that have been in the industry for some time how to communicate in a rapidly evolving online environment, in a non-judgmental and supportive way.

What about the common argument that you lose 'something' in a virtual environment as opposed to face-to-face? I hear this argument a lot, especially when I (repeatedly) bring up remote working as an alternative to growing inside a physical space or tying hiring practices to a specific section of geography. The following quote triggered some ideas for me in how a social enterprise intranet, like the one developed by Knowledge Architecture (Synthesis) can be used in a mentoring program:

"Although the number of companies using online learning is increasing, many are finding that this new medium often results in low retention and completion rates [author's note: remember this is 2002, cavemen with giant laptops]. Many employees miss the social interaction provided by a classroom environment or are not comfortable with using a computer."

Once paired a mentor and mentee can deepen their relationship and increase knowledge sharing across the firm by using Synthesis for communication. A mentor and mentee agree to follow and subscribe to each other's posts on the social newsfeed, the mentee agrees that if s/he has a question that can be asked on the newsfeed that she will do so and the mentor agrees that she will answer it via that same medium. Appropriate questions could be any cultural, organizational, work process type of questions that don't necessitate the type of answer that includes sensitive or confidential information (an information type used heavily in mentoring relationships). Additionally, any questions asked have a compounded benefit for the entire firm because a portion of the mentor/mentee relationship becomes a public, searchable record. In this way the mentee is contributing a great deal to the firm just by asking questions and the mentor is creating a great benefit by contributing the answers to the permanent knowledge base. 

Dorothy Leonard, along with some colleagues, bubbled another question about online mentoring to the surface of my proverbial idea tar pit when she states that:

"Mentors also identify opportunities for training. Perhaps even more important is the knowledge of informal managerial systems conveyed through what some researchers call the 'political function' of the mentor or reffered to as the 'power perspective'"

and when her article states that:

"Research in cognitive psychology confirms that when people actively participate in learning new material they are much more likely to remember it."

Would an online mentoring program have this same effect, or would the medium of the internet act as leveler of the playing field?

It occurred to me that active does not automatically denote 'physical', as one can easily by active on a social network or a digital medium. Her article, 'Using Mentoring and Storytelling to Transfer Knowledge in the Workplace', makes an excellent point about the importance of disruptive mentoring relationships, where the top brass (in her case a CEO) is mentored by younger staff and it comes to her attention that there were still some powerful and negative myth's about how business was to be done at her firm through that disruptive mentoring relationship. 

This is another potential benefit of having an open online mentoring process using a social intranet like Synthesis as the platform, these type of organizational 'myths' will be revealed in the normal process of threads and comments, the top brass can identify them and take action to 'change the story'. These are not stories that are told from a place of malice but from a place of not being aware of the momentum of cultural change within an organization. This is where reverse or disruptive mentoring can come in and change the myth to a more productive one. The article goes on to say:

"If the values and norms of the organization are truly held, there should be stories somewhere about behaviors that support those views. If there are only stories to the contrary, that is a strong message to management."

This is where Knowledge Management and to a greater degree, ethnography, can synergistically plug into the mentoring process, in pulling the negative myths from the collective enterprise culture, analyzing the result, and reporting a summary to those concerned with culture change.

Do you feel online mentoring can be effective? If so, which of the above models does it support more, a Western model or an indigenous model?

What are your thoughts on the differences between the traditional Western business model of mentoring and the tens of thousands of years old methods and definitions of mentoring from the indigenous perspective?

Bibliography

Chris, H., & Work & Education Research & Development Services. (2009). Workplace Mentoring: a literature review. Auckland: Work & Education Research & Development Services.

Ensher E A, Heun C and Blanchard A (2002) Online mentoring and computer-mediated communication: New directions in research. Journal of Vocational Behavior (63) pp 264-288.

Murphy W M (2012) Reverse mentoring at work: Fostering cross-generational learning and developing millennial leaders. Human Resource Management (51, 4) pp 549-574

Swap W, Leonard D, Shields M and Abrams L (2001) Using Mentoring and Storytelling to Transfer Knowledge in the Workplace. Journal of Management Information Systems (18, 1) pp 95-114.