For some minority managers, however, social and psychological support are derived from two mentors--a majority senior who lends educational and political support and a minority senior who understands the special psychological challenges for a fellow minority professional.
Peers as Mentors
Lacking satisfactory mentoring by an experienced superior manager, peers may serve as alternatives.16 That is, a more experienced professional colleague may assist you in learning your tasks and understanding the organization's informal rules. Such people may even lend psychological support when you are confused or discouraged. This of course can be very helpful. Nonetheless, hierarchical peers are poor substitutes for a more knowledgeable and politically influential superior as mentor. Peers are likely to be somewhat competitive with only the most altruistic being unthreatened if you were to become exceptionally successful. Therefore, they might lend a hand when you are in obvious difficulty, but be less supportive if you are performing well.
Even more limiting, a peer as mentor is not able immediately to represent your interests upward in the organization by proposing you for challenging projects and promotions. Sometime in the future, however, such a person may move upward and be in a position to promote your career, so it is a wise effort on your part to develop and maintain good relations with those of your peers whom you most respect and find most congenial with your personal values and organizational aspirations. Note that your main criterion for identification should be congenial values and aspirations, not merely the peer's success. The art of forming viable vertical coalitions revolves around mentors with whom you can maintain your integrity because their values and dreams are consistent with yours. Thus, you are able to communicate candidly because you trust each other; you do not continually have to put on an act to maintain your status as valued protégé.
Assigned Mentors
To assist young graduates in adjusting to their first jobs, some firms have instituted formal mentoring programs. A higher-level manager, usually not your immediate superior, is assigned as your mentor with specific responsibility for serving as a "wise godfather" to whom you can go for guidance. The intent is to ensure that a promising young professional is not hidden under a non-sponsoring first-line supervisor.
Although laudable in intent, such formal mentoring programs suffer from the handicap of formalizing the informal, rationalizing what is more a non-rational relationship. Mentor-protégé relations have a fragile chemistry that reflects mutual attraction based on shared styles or values. This could arise in a planned association, but it is certainly not automatic.
In addition, planning mentor-protégé relations implies that they are not occurring naturally. And if they are not, it probably reflects either vertical competition or narrowly focused interests of high achievers. As indicated, trust is critical to effective mentoring and managers are not likely to extend this downward if they perceive limited career advancement for themselves and fear being bypassed by ambitious juniors. Thus, a firm actively pruning middle management while still recruiting new graduates will have a hard time promoting mentorship among the uneasy middle.
Even in an expanding business, upwardly mobile managers may be just too busy and self-oriented to expend time on mentoring their juniors. It is a role that would seem to have no immediate payback. Unless top management builds feedback on mentoring performance into the performance evaluation and reward system, attention won't be paid.
One of the simplest reinforcements for formal or informal mentoring is for top management to insist that assigned protégé s submit confidential evaluations of their mentor's helpfulness. Confidence in confidentiality is critical, of course, for most of us would be reluctant to be candid if we thought that specific criticism of a hierarchical superior could be traced back to us.
