Most of us will not have quite as golden an opportunity to impress potential powerful mentors as Colin Powell, but we will confront some promising possibilities. How well you perform and relate to potential sponsors will affect your career success. We examine mentor-protégé relations, particularly what protégés can do to meet their mentors' needs. We begin with a particularly impressive woman who is moving up the ladder in a large regional bank.
Judith Greene and Marshall Wilde
Judith Greene is the newly appointed vice president of administration of the International Division of the bank. She joined the division as a junior analyst years ago right after she graduated from Eastern College with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. She was subsequently promoted to senior analyst and area supervisor.
Judith has mixed feelings about her early years as an analyst. A lot of the work was boring because the tasks were routine and feedback inadequate. At times she felt like a nameless, faceless automaton, but she enjoyed the bank as an institution and sought opportunities both inside and outside the division to talk about investments. She was very active in several professional banking and investment societies. She got along well with most of the staff including support personnel, apparently because she did much of her own typing. She saw this not as a status issue but as a pragmatic opportunity: Her reports would already have been submitted while her peers were still awaiting theirs from the typing pool.
Judith feels that she did a better job than most analysts, but she frankly states that her break occurred rather fortuitously. Judith's husband, a manager for a local industrial firm, had graduated from a prestigious Old Ivy University. At an alumni dance he introduced her to fellow alumnus Marshall Wilde, then senior vice president in the Corporate Loan Division of Trustworthy Trust with which Tom Greene had done business. Shortly thereafter, Wilde had been named executive vice president and head of the International Division. Wilde was a dynamic and committed man interested in improving minority and female opportunities. Since Judith clearly had the requisite skills and performance record, she was subsequently promoted to area supervisor where she did a fine job (while benefitting from a number of informal conversations with Wilde).
Trustworthy Trust Company is a large, multiservice regional bank headquartered in a metropolitan downtown. Its assets rank it in the top fifty banks in the United States. Its main office is an imposing granite edifice at the center of the financial district. It fairly reeks of stability and conservatism.
The International Division is the smallest of the bank's five major units, but like the others is headed by an executive vice president. The division is charged with maintaining correspondent relations with foreign banks, exchanging currencies, and assisting its corporate customers in raising funds and conducting business in foreign countries. The division annually hires four or five MBAs with special skills and experience (usually a foreign language and knowledge of a particular country). Because of their turnover, however, Marshall Wilde is considering whether to hire more people right out of college rather than after graduate school.
New professional employees are assigned to the analyst pool where they gather data and write reports requested by various officers. Much of their information is gathered from the bank's extensive library, and some from a local university. Frequently they write or call foreign embassies and governments. The analysts are located in a common work area not affectionately termed the "bullpen." It is crowded, warm, and a bit shabby.
After eighteen to twenty-four months, a junior analyst normally is promoted to senior analyst. Theoretically, this means that he or she handles more difficult assignments, but work location and process are unchanged. The first substantial promotion comes after three to four years when a senior analyst could become an area supervisor (and is considered a junior officer). An area supervisor directs four or five analysts specializing in a specific country (such as France) or a region (such as Central America). The area supervisor makes decisions on small transactions and consults with appropriate senior officers on major matters. Once or twice a year, supervisors make three- to five-day business trips to their regions of specialization. These trips are keenly anticipated. The area supervisors' offices are located around the outside walls of the bullpen.
The division's senior vice presidents and vice presidents are the critical decision makers. Their offices are located in another area of the floor opening to the elevators. The reception space and offices are impressive and luxurious, all in colonial decor and Williamsburg green, with wall-to-wall carpeting in the hall and oriental rugs in each office. Each officer has a spacious private office with a secretary just outside the door.
These senior officers specialize by geography and travel frequently. Either the senior vice president or the vice president for each area is expected to be at headquarters, but actually both are often away on trips. About half of their time is spent traveling. They frequently complain about the onerous burden of these trips but their gripes appear to be more joking than real.
Trustworthy Trust Company is a successful institution and the International Division enjoys a good reputation. Nonetheless, Marshall Wilde has been concerned about the younger staff. Over half of them leave the bank after eighteen to thirty months. Most join smaller banks; some get married and have children; and some just drop out, throw away their watches and go skiing. Exit interviews elicit complaints about being bored, the poor working conditions, the crisis atmosphere, and not knowing what's going on or what happens to their reports. Analysts (particularly the women) are bitter about lack of cooperation and respect from clerical personnel. No one seems to be in charge of them. When a consultant was called in, he administered a questionnaire to all divisional professionals and managers. Analysts' Responses to a Question: What Is The Most Dissatisfying Aspect Of Your Job?
- The detail work involved and the constant phone calls from branches for foreign exchange rates. These jobs could be done by a clerk.
- Being involved with clerical work, such as typing and being taken for granted.
- Lack of knowledge as to where my job will lead.
- The closed-minded narrowness of most of senior management that leads to Pettiness, lack of communication, and the lack of a more democratic environment.
- Lack of contact with people outside the bank and lack of physical activity.
- Lack of experience causes me to waste too much time.
- Lack of sufficient time for free thinking.
- The physical working conditions are intolerable in that there is too little space, no privacy, and a very high noise level.
- The remuneration- the salary structure is such that it presents an unoptimistic future. If one would desire to stay, one would be passing up a great deal of financial reward. In order to financially succeed in banking, one must transfer to another bank to receive financial remuneration.
In addition, the consultant conducted management training sessions for the senior officers that covered topics such as human needs, the meaning of work, motivation, and change. Unfortunately, several of the senior vice presidents and vice presidents did not attend all the meetings. Some of them expressed exception with the consultant's views on people's needs for autonomy, competence, and power. And a couple of senior officers seemed to sleep through the sessions.
Wilde has now promoted Judith to the newly created position of vice president of administration. He has not given her an explicit job description, but he sees it as dealing with the low morale among analysts and the poor administration of bullpen activities. Judith is very enthusiastic and optimistic about her opportunities in the new post.
What does Judith do?
When Judith Greene visited my class of MBA students, she was asked if she felt guilty that she came to the executive vice president's attention only because Marshall Wilde and her husband had been college classmates. Judith replied absolutely not because she had always been an outstanding performer and chance contacts play a role in everyone's career. The key is to take advantage of them.
In taking advantage of her opportunity, however, Judith faces a paradox in that her greatest asset, Marshall Wilde's support, is also her main vulnerability. Most people interpret her new position as vice president of administration as inherently weak. The post has no history of success, with only two direct subordinates (a secretary and an assistant), and no significant budget. And her office location just off the bullpen appears to signal her distance from the "real" senior officers arrayed in their Williamsburg luxury.
Indeed, location looms particularly large to professional women sensitive to symbolic power slights. In discussing this case with a group of female human resource managers, I found them sharply divided on whether Judith should even accept the position. Half felt she should decline if Marshall were unwilling to locate her office in the line of vice presidential offices,
The other half, however, argued that there was an advantage to being contiguous to the bullpen because this is where she must have an impact if she is to meet Marshall's somewhat vague objective of improving morale among the analysts and thus reducing turnover. Minimum status symbols and physical proximity could facilitate her uncovering fundamental problems and establishing herself as a resource for solving them.
Location symbolism, whether it is more important to be closer to the ultimate power figure (especially if that person is also your primary mentor) or closer to the people you must ultimately influence, is tricky for anyone, but perhaps especially so for a woman. On the one hand, she can worry that her high sounding title without substantial human or financial resources with an office distant from the power center will be seen as tokenism. On the other hand, if she is seen as "too close" organizationally and physically to a senior male mentor, she may fear other's suspicion about her competence and "real" relation to the boss.
Regardless of location, Judith Greene is heavily dependent on support from the executive vice president, Marshall Wilde. Since she controls no significant resources, she must either get his pre-action approval or post-action ratification for her initiatives. Therefore, keeping him pleased with her progress is critical. And ultimately, her future at the bank depends on Wilde's success with top management.
Before looking at Judith's specific steps, let's examine current theory and practice in mentoring and being an effective protégé.
Mentors, Sponsors, and Protégés
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.
1970; 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.
