Mentoring in recent years has been a hot topic in popular and academic management literature. But of course the issue is an old one. The cynic's complaint has long been, "It's not what you know, but who you know." So it has been argued that rather than rewarding performance, managers promote people whom they like. Certainly, such affiliative favoritism bordering on family nepotism has occurred and still occurs too frequently. Nonetheless, most mentor-protégé relations are more benign-and if anything, the causative flow is the reverse of the cynic's. Reliably good performance captures a senior's eye and a mutually rewarding relationship develops. Perhaps two thirds of senior executives have benefitted from mentors earlier in their careers, and they seem happier with their careers than those who made it entirely on their own.
Early Mentor-Protégé Relations: Biographical career descriptions frequently highlight the importance of a "special other" (usually older) who plays a crucial role in one's maturation. It is rarely a parent because we discount their admiration as being unconditional. But the ninth grade science teacher who recognizes a boy's hitherto not displayed analytical skill or the high school field hockey coach who rewards a girl's until then discouraged competitive fire can become a reference mentor never to be forgotten. In such adolescent experiences, we are not talking about role models because it is not that the boy or girl wants to be like the science teacher or coach. Rather, it is that the mentor has encouraged the protégé to act upon his or her potential--or as the G.S. Army television commercials put it, "To be all that you can be."
Such youngster protégé-sponsor relationships tend to be fleeting. In most cases, the protégé is too immature and self-centered to return much to the mentor. By college, graduate school, and first career job, however, the relationship potential increases. The history of academic stars is replete with stories of intense sponsor-protégé relationships where the senior professor took on an almost godlike role to the ambitious junior.4 The senior is flattered that a bright young person admires his or her theories and the young scholar is thrilled to have the legend's guidance in reducing the threatening ambiguity of what is necessary for success.
Note the mixture of rationality and emotion. The mentor and protégé exchange skills and tasks: The student gathers data and crunches numbers while the professor conveys theory and experience. But also being exchanged is emotional reassurance-to the student who feels that someone important has confidence in him or her; to the professor, that in middle and older age, he or she is still admired and valued.
These dual task and emotional components are inherent in most mentoring relationships, but one or the other can be emphasized and at least partially separated. Thus, one person may primarily teach you about the organization and how to perform your tasks, while another provides comfort and support when you feel discouraged.
In looking back on the mentors in my life from the distance of many years, I think they took special interest in me because I reminded them of themselves. They correctly or incorrectly saw in me characteristics that they valued in themselves, be they looks, perseverance, intelligence, or commitment. By helping me to succeed, they validated the very attributes that for them explained their own success.
Mentoring Relations in Business: Surveys of middle and senior managers suggest that anywhere from 30 to 75 percent feel they have benefitted from mentor like support from a senior colleague. The great majority of protégé-mentor relations start when we are in our twenties and thirties. By the time we reach our forties, we appear to have outgrown our readiness to be the protégé of an older person, and hopefully, we have reached a level of influence and success that will allow us to begin mentoring others. The range of responses reflects the subjectivity of such relationships since most are informal and simply emerge. Although no data exist, it is possible that many mentors are not aware of the role they are playing for a protégé and that some protégés even may be insensitive to what their sponsor is attempting to do for them.
Regardless of awareness, however, the mentor's role falls on a commitment continuum: (1) passing on technical skills, (2) providing helpful "public" knowledge about career opportunities in the firm, (3) taking an emotional interest in the protégé, (4) helping the protégé understand the "ins and outs" of the organization by sharing "private" knowledge, (5) providing the protégé with high visibility opportunities to perform well, and (6) formally and informally pushing the protégé for promotions.
Most mentoring is restricted to teaching and personal support, but the happy recipients of such support, in comparison with non-mentored peers seem to know more about their organizations, express greater job satisfaction, have better defined career plans, and greater commitment to their organizations. Thus, we can have a circular chicken-egg situation: Having a mentor leads to better attitudes and performance which brings greater visibility and new opportunities to attach to high-flying star mentors.
Super upwardly mobile managers especially benefit from this ability to attach themselves to stars just a bit older and senior to them. They make it to senior executive level in approximately twelve years in comparison with most successful others who require sixteen to eighteen years. As illustrated in the case of Judith Greene, it is not clear what is intentional or accidental in forming such vertical coalitions. The ambitious subordinate who is too blatantly political in seeking the sponsorship of a senior star is likely to offend his or her peers, immediate superior, and even the intended mentor. Nonetheless, effective young professionals simply don't wait for lightning to strike or their good performance to attract sponsors. They seek out information about their boss's goals, problems, and pressures. They are more active in reaching out to senior others, at least to the extent of finding out what they do and investigating whose values and organizational dreams are most compatible with theirs. They don't allow their narrow job tasks to totally determine with whom they communicate.
"As soon as I got to the Senate, I had already picked out the man I admired and made it a point to get very close to him (e.g., Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio)... I pretty much let him guide me. Every new senator needs a man like that, someone he feels free to go to for advice. You need somebody who's been around, who knows how to do things, knows the ins and outs, all the intricate maneuvers you don't learn overnight."
What is involved here is more reliability and trust than Machiavellian politicking (although of course some of the latter is often present). An upwardly mobile star wants subordinates who are competent, reliable, and loyal, but whose loyalties are based on a shared vision rather than merely sycophancy for personal rewards. The senior wants upwardly mobile subordinates whom he or she can trust just as the would-be protégé wants a senior who can be followed with minimal compromise of personal integrity. As Goldwater puts it, "The greatest lesson that Washington teaches is no matter what you do, be honest. That sticks out in Washington" (and most every place else). His greatest presidential hero was Harry Truman because, "When he said something in the evening, he felt the same way the next morning."
Phases in Mentor-Protégé Relations
Many of us enjoy several mentors in our lives so any one is not usually permanent--at least not to the extent that we continue forever to interact with him or her.
Therefore, phases including a beginning and ending occur in most mentor-protégé relations.
- Initiation: A period of six months to a year when the relationship gets started and achieves importance for mentor and protégé. The protégé's dreams become concrete expectations. The senior manager provides coaching, challenging work, and visibility. The junior manager provides technical assistance, respect, and a desire to be coached. Communications occur around work tasks.
- Cultivation: A period of two to five years during which career, social, and psychological support expands to a maximum. Both individuals continue to benefit from the relationship while interaction opportunities increase.
- Separation: At some point, tension enters most mentor-protégé-relations leading to change in feelings and behavior. Often the junior manager no longer wants guidance, but rather greater opportunity to work autonomously. Or the senior manager faces a career or midlife crisis and is less available to help. Or more simply, corporate transfers separate the individuals so social and psychological support can't be provided. However caused, the blocked opportunity can create resentment and hostility.
- Redefinition: At some indefinite period after separation, the relationship may be reestablished but more like peer friendship. The mentor relationship is no longer needed and in time resentment and anger diminish. Gratitude and appreciation for past assistance may be acknowledged, but the protégé has established equal adult status.
To illustrate the evolution of these mentoring phases, I can review my own relationship over seventeen years with a mentor.
1964-1967: Initiation and cultivation. On leaving graduate school, I was hired as a lecturer by the management department head at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was an extremely strong leader who pushed hard for productivity while also acting as benevolent father (as leadership theory describes it, he exhibited high-task and high-consideration orientations). He assigned me to be a teaching assistant in his industrial relations course where he greatly valued my ability to teach the course on short (even no) notice if he was unable to make class because of his active outside affairs. He was extremely helpful in personal matters even providing a loan for moving expenses, inviting me to share in his consulting, and exercising his clout to get a prestigious university physician to travel out of state to treat my infant son when he became seriously ill. As a reward for my helpfulness and loyalty, he saw that I was promoted from Lecturer to Assistant Professor.
1968: Failure of mentorship. To the surprise of both my mentor and myself, however, my promotion to associate professor with tenure was rejected by our departmental faculty. The department head announced his immediate resignation because, in his view, his senior colleagues had blocked his protégé's promotion in retaliation for their disagreement with him about department policy. (Actually, it was probably resentment of what they viewed as his excessively authoritarian leadership.) He remained as a professor but resigned his administrative post.
1968-1969: Establishing a new relationship. My vulnerability as a protégé to a disliked senior was manifest in my being rejected as a political tactic to undermine the department head. Of course it was not "fair" that I was judged by my association rather than the merits of my work, but there was nothing I could do to change the past. I could work on the future, however.
I approached the full professor who seemed most opposed to the former department head to open a dialogue, not about the unfairness of my rejection, but around our mutual work. I asked for copies of his papers and sent him copies of mine with requests for his advice. I tried to have lunch with him or at least sit at the same luncheon table a couple of times a week. It all sounds quite manipulative in the retelling, but I discovered that our interests and values were actually much more similar than mine had ever been to those of the former department head. I came to admire this senior colleague very much. Although I had matured to the point where I no longer needed the parent like social assistance that my first mentor had provided, I much appreciated my new mentor's intellectual guidance.
The replacement of my first mentor as department head and undoubtedly the now active support of my new sponsor resulted in my promotion sailing through after a transition year.
7970; Conflict with first mentor: During the first few years after his departure as department head, my former mentor and I maintained cordial relations, albeit sharply curtailed because I had moved on to my own courses and was no longer involved in his. However, at this time our relationship sharply deteriorated, virtually ending in anger and threats. Three incidents were involved: (1) I served on a faculty curriculum committee that voted to eliminate his course as a core requirement in the graduate program (although I voted against the change, his anger was directed to all committee members); (2) I wrote an article critical of the assertive, antiunion corporate policies which he favored; and (3) I grew a mustache which, trivial as it was, seemed to verify for him that I had joined the antiestablishment, countercultural forces then so threatening to campus conservatives.
1979-1981: Reestablishment. After being promoted to full professor in 1975, appointment as assistant to the president in 1979, and promotion to vice president of the university in 1981, my former mentor and I began to communicate infrequently but respectfully around money for his research center. Since I was responsible for university fundraising, he wanted my opinion on some proposals. By now, the heat of anger had faded, my reputation had been established in an area entirely separate from his, and I had achieved high status so that in his eyes I had become a peer (and I suppose 1 had finally escaped seeing him as a surrogate for my dead father).
1985-1986: Retirement and death. My former department head and mentor retired from the faculty during the same year that my second mentor and friend passed away. I remember with gratitude the fatherly assistance that my first mentor gave when I had just arrived still poor and concerned about my son's health. Yet, I realize that a break was inevitable even if his nomination of me for promotion hadn't been rejected. His domineering authoritarian style would have grated on me as I gained experience and confidence. I was probably lucky in that my initial promotion rejection forced me to be more assertive in reaching out to other older colleagues.
However self-seeking my intention in reaching out to the senior colleague who became my second mentor, it led to a long-lasting relationship greatly valued by us both. His widow told me after his death that when he went into the hospital for his final losing battle with leukemia he took with him a note I had sent him expressing my gratitude for what he had taught me about academic and human values. I still miss him.
My tale illustrates that mentor-protégé relationships are clearly not just emotionless instrumental exchanges. Sentiments and indeed passions can become involved that inflate the risk in things going sour, rather like a spoiled marriage. In academia, sexual relationships between mentoring professors and graduate students unfortunately have been quite common. And of course such affairs are not unknown in business. They are extremely dangerous to one's psychological well-being and career success-not to mention spiritual state. Personally, I feel a professor bedding a student or a manager becoming involved with a subordinate is a most heinous act because of the coercion potential in their power difference. And of course, some unscrupulous students and ambitious subordinates have used their attractiveness and the older person's loneliness to manipulate them for personal gain.
Even if sex is not involved, mentor-protégé relations can involve strong emotions, especially when parent-child imagery is evoked. Escaping from sponsor domination or a protégé declaring his or her own identity can be difficult if both experience it as symbolic rejection of father or mother. Hence, like all human connections, being a mentor or a protégé involves risk of the senior being disappointed in the behavior and performance of a junior in whom time and political capital has been invested. Emotional insulation may be easier, but a manager's willingness to incur risks in committing to younger people is crucial to developing leaders.
