The Mentor's Way, Part 1: 6 Levels of Mentoring Commitment

Dear readers, I firmly believe in, and aspire to be, a "Mentor who's changed your life". My life's mission is to be one such individual for as many mentees as possible. When mentoring others, that is the benchmark that I set for myself, and that is how I request feedback from my mentees. So here I am, looking for friends in the mentoring space (whether you are a mentor, a mentee, or both!); trying to put some structure into the art and science of mentoring; sharing what my mentees liked and not liked about my mentoring style; and asking my professional network for input, tips, stories (the good, the bad, the ugly) so that TOGETHER, we can all do better for the next generation of professionals.

Here I'm using 'mentoring' and 'coaching' broadly, though these are two distinct roles. Mentoring involves leveraging the mentor's experiences, efforts, and networks and includes teaching and sponsoring (it includes pushing, pulling, shielding, and steering). Coaching relies heavily on innate capabilities of the coachee, helping them find their purpose and motivation by facilitating clarity. Ideally, you'd do both, but the more inexperienced the junior, the more mentoring is involved. Coaching requires empathy, trust, and a big-picture view even when where the coach themselves have no expertise.

This is my first entry - we are setting up a structure to benchmark our performance as mentors. Please provide your thoughts and feedback if this is at all helpful.

The 6 Levels of Commitment

While full-time professional coaches exist, mentoring and coaching is more often not a paid full-time profession, let's face it, professional coaches are only employed where internal leaders (for whatever reason) can't coach their own subordinates, or the company brings someone in to coach the most senior level leaders. Mentoring is often a core expectation of a supervisor, manager, or leader across all industries; fresh grads are being told to 'find a mentor' and leaders are being told to 'be a mentor'. There is no argument in academia nor through practical professional experience that employees who are properly mentored and coached perform better and grow faster than those without.

Yet...there seems to always be such a difference in degrees of effort that managers and leaders put into mentoring and coaching their teams. From the mentor's perspective, the spectrum could range anywhere from 'intentional sabotage' to 'passionate and committed':

1. Intentional Sabotage - will go out of their way to first-degree murder your career (with pre-meditation and intent) if given the chance; not common, but the vengeful ones might do this, often as a result of irretrievably broken relationship (i.e. they will orchestrate an opportunity and push you off a cliff). What it looks like in real-life: short of outright firing or physically harming you, they will make up damning rumors about you and set you up to be punished, they will step all over you when you are down and will throw you under the bus for anything bad that they did.
2. Intentionally unhelpful - will not spend the extra effort to destroy you but will sabotage if given the opportunity (i.e. they will push you off a cliff if you stand close enough to the edge or step on your hand if you're already hanging off of it). What it looks like in real-life: highlights (and potentially exaggerates) all your flaws and play down all your achievements when asked.
3. Apathetic and unhelpful - is generally indifferent towards you, will not guide or teach you, and will not do anything for you that requires extra effort on their part (i.e. while they didn't push you, they will walk right past you if you are hanging off a cliff). What it looks like in real-life: leaders who treat you like replaceable tools, they will lead their lives as normal, if you can survive, good, if you can't then whatever.
4. Apathetic but helpful - like No. 3 but occasionally provide helpful insights if asked, they will not go out of their way to improve their mentoring or coaching skills and will not set goals that involve growing the mentee's capabilities or helping them achieve their career aspirations (i.e. they might walk past, but if you shout for help, they will come to your aid.) What it looks like in real-life: most new leaders and strangers sit around here as they have their own lives to worry about, but they are good Samaritans and don't know whether or not your relationship is worth the effort. This is the standard of a responsible and helpful citizen to a stranger.
5. Dutifully helpful - treats mentorship/coaching as a job or a duty and will seek to do it well; will take steps to meet the expectations of a good mentor, including trying to understand the mentee's goals and aspirations and making efforts to improve their mentoring and coaching skills (i.e. will get you off that cliff edge without being asked and tell you off about going near cliffs, might also start getting you trained up on grip-strength and pull-ups). What it looks like in real-life: similar behavior to someone who is a professional in the service industry (e.g. a doctor, therapist, or lawyer), they will talk to you about your struggles and offer feedback and solutions to help you grow and handle the situation. They may exercise tough-love and be willing to give critical feedback even if it means you may be upset with them because it is part of their professional edict to behave in such way. When you are on the same team (i.e. same company), this is the standard everyone should be at.
6. Passionately helpful and committed to your success - All of No. 5 but with a little extra; another term for this may be 'aggressively helpful' and it is a mission to mentor and grow someone into a successful human being. What it looks like in real-life: as though you are their younger sibling, favorite niece/nephew, or best friend - they will celebrate and boast about your success and get protective when you're being unfairly treated by anyone. They will do everything in their power and influence your success in the most self-less manner, will introduce you to all their connections and resources, will teach you everything they know even if it means you might overtake them professionally, will give you an opportunity to grow even if they can do the job better, will take accountability for your mistakes, will believe in your potential even when you make mistakes or look down on yourself. Level 6 mentors would often be the ones you find mentoring individuals outside of their regular job scope, including picking up those mentees outside their industry as well. Level 6 mentors aren't necessarily the best, they are also in no way the most skilled (an important distinction here is that passion =/= skill though it can certainly help), Passionate mentors can be a little overwhelming for some mentees and should be given feedback about toning down the 'helpfulness' if this is so.

As an organization, any individual who is at level 3 or below should, unless they are committed to changing their ways, be eliminated, especially when they are a leader. They are cancerous to your human resources and if such behavior is contagious, you will have a downward spiral of unmotivated and unhappy workforce whose only reward for performing well, is supervisory backlash. All of your high performers will want to leave if they are stuck with leaders who sit in 1-3.

If you fill your organization with 5s and 6s, you've not only got an eco-system of keen performers, but you've also got others lending a hand when they can to help others grow.

From Unhelpful to Committed

So how do we go from 1-3 or even 4 to 5-6? Note that the spectrum above describes attitude and behaviors and has little to do with skills. While it is somewhat unreasonable to expect all leaders to be passionate and committed mentors, it is not unreasonable to expect a dutifully helpful leader when it comes to growing the next generation of talents or more specifically, their successor.

The issue with current corporate culture is, performance review is rarely determined from the bottom up, which means, even where feedback is 360 degrees, a manager's ratings will not reflect how great a mentor they are to their subordinates.

Many leaders who fail at mentoring and coaching are met with professional success and are rewarded whether or not they choose to mentor properly; and in many cases, bad mentoring actually rewards mediocrity because it lets incumbents keep their jobs due to a capability gap that can never be closed.

Organizations initiate leadership pulse surveys, but it is rare to see direct actions that comes out of negative survey results. Bad reviews don't always become consequences other than a metaphorical slap-on-the-wrist like when you see your cholesterol level after a medical exam. Your manager in question might start improving for about 2 months (about the same amount of time you can hold off on dessert) then it all goes back to the same old cycle. To break this cycle, mentors and leaders tasked with grooming individuals for succession who fail to do so for more than a reasonable period of time should be treated as a having failed their job requirement.

As with all behavioral change management initiatives, top-down leader-led commitment to change followed by systematic changes that reward good behavior and penalize bad behavior (e.g. by formalizing performance requirements with mentoring expectations), increasing difficulty for bad actors and make desired behaviors easy to achieve, are all options from an organizational perspective.

If you are an independent contributor or simply have no say over such policies, you can start your own behavioral change when it comes to mentorship by channeling the inner-protective big-brother/ big-sister when approaching a mentee. Practice empathy, try to understand their needs, but not in a way that demand that they understand you (you should not hear yourself saying internally or out loud: "I had to go through this, so do you!"). Work hard to impress and inspire your mentees the way you would want to impress your boss. Humans respond to reciprocity; they will go out of their way to try to impress you.

Time for diagnostics

Take a quick check of your own team and circumstances.

What level are your mentors at?

What level are you at as a mentor? You may have multiple mentees and your level of commitment towards each mentee may be different, and that is fine, one only has so much time on their hands and passion and commitment requires time and considerable mental capacity.

Please feel free to share your mentoring and coaching stories in the comment section below.

All feedback is welcome, share this with someone you think might find it helpful.

Disclaimer: This is article contains personal views, ideals, and opinions based on a mix of personal experience and those of friends, mentees, mentors and family members. Cited examples are hypothetical and not references to real people, however, they are designed to be relatable by readers from broad background.