SO2 – Preparing for mentoring

Academics have shared how and where mentoring has been helpful and what to be cautious about when setting up mentoring relationships. We encourage you to reflect on their experiences as part of preparing for mentoring to increase the opportunities that mentoring will create value for your career.

Conversation starters:

As a mentee:

What am I looking for in a mentor?
Where might I find an appropriate mentor?
What is the burning question I would like to explore?
What would be a good outcome?
How often will I ask myself if mentoring is meeting my expectations?
How will the mentor and I know if the mentoring is effective for my needs?
How and what will we need to ‘contract’ to ensure that the mentoring is effective and to keep us ‘on track’?
Based on what I have discovered through this activity, what else might be important for our mentoring relationship?
As I look through the wider tool, the reported data on mentoring, and as I answer these questions, what are some of the prompts that it would be helpful for my mentor and I to explore together?
How might I make use of this Academic Career Conversation tool with a mentor?

As a current or future mentor:

Why do I want to be a mentor?
What do I have to offer a mentee?
What skills and attributes might I need to develop further to become an effective mentor, for example: listening; responsiveness; working with growth edges; building trust; giving feedback; appreciating the wider context of the mentee’s world?
What questions will I ask to find out what the mentee is expecting?
How will the mentee and I know if the mentoring is effective for their needs?
How and what will we need to ‘contract’ to ensure that the mentoring is effective and to keep us ‘on track’?
As I look through the activity, the reported data on mentoring, and as I answer these questions, what are some of the prompts that it would be helpful for my mentee and I to explore together?
How might I make use of the wider Academic Career Conversation tool resource with a mentee?
How might mentoring enable my own career?

Examples:

Here are some examples of what our participants shared about their experience of being a mentor, being mentored, or organising mentoring.

Mentor Descriptions

A friend, someone who: creates a safe space; provides personal support; opens minds; provides a sounding board for others, including senior people; provides advice and guidance; makes connections; creates introductions to networks; works organically

What Mentors Help With

Provide support from a place of knowledge and experience. Are a: a role model; critical friend; hold me to account; provide specific advice and support, such as around learning and teaching, professional practice, research, securing funding, getting published, leadership

Frequency

Monthly; every six to eight weeks; timely support for issues that are burning at a particular time.

Formal Schemes

Exist for: new staff; probation; women; faculty or department; education; research; knowledge exchange; associate professors; future leaders; managers. Cross-university mentoring in Scotland.

Informal Mentoring

Helping others and being helped, but not as part of a formal arrangement; the nature of the department is to help others with successful staff supporting others; someone I can contact if I need anything; organic; not formalised; peer mentors; previous colleague; ex doctoral supervisor.

Risks with Informal Mentoring

There is a risk that informality doesn’t necessarily lead to quality: ‘Sometimes mentors are good. Sometimes they are bad. Sometimes they carry on. Sometimes they stop.‘

Toxic Mentoring

As mentioned above, the quality of mentors can vary especially, but not necessarily, in informal mentoring. Some mentors are ‘forced’ to undertake the role; inconsistency in support for mentors, quality of support, commitment; abuse of trust; mentors assigned but don’t engage; no monitoring; male dominated; not evaluated for quality

Identifying Mentors

Mentors can be hard to identify; others have identified them as follows: from VC Staff Award winners; HEA Fellows; National Teaching Fellows; those who have been promoted for their achievements; someone who I gravitate towards because I can see they are doing a good job – they may not necessarily be more senior; external people I work with on projects; brokered by another; some mentors can be ‘over-used’, which can be unmanageable for the mentor and the mentee.

Support for Mentors

Whilst some feel it is an insult to offer good people support for being a mentor, many mentors said that they would welcome support as ‘You feel slightly vulnerable that you are dong something with the very best of intentions, but are you doing it right?’….from a confidence perspective it would be helpful.’

Some institutions do orientation and support for mentors, including exploring boundaries and commitment; Special Interest Group for Mentors; some institutions, without breaching confidentiality, collect mentee development themes from mentors to inform future staff/organisational development support.

Recognition and Reward

Mainly this is something that people are expected to do, or is part of their responsibilities and so is not specifically rewarded, although some have a time allowance for it; altruistic motives; many mentors shared the satisfaction they get from being a mentor; others have used it for evidence on their CV, for promotion applications, progression bids, and in their annual appraisal. Motivated by: ‘shaping the world in a way that you want it to be shaped’. A potential for [positive] hidden influence connected to commitment to the institution.

Career Mentoring

Helped me: draft job applications; mock interviews; informal recruitment and selection feedback; achieve promotion; understand the strategic direction of the university, the experience I need to gain and the outputs I need to achieve; supported innovative ideas. It has been helpful to have a range of mentors, sometimes at the same time.

What Would be Helpful in Career Mentoring

For a smoother career journey: clarity on where going and why to help inform focus and decisions; foresight, thinking short, medium and longer term and planning strategically; thinking about academic identity and disciplinary identity, the kind of career want to have; what it means to move between grades; considering leadership and management tracks; how positioning self for rest of working life, not just within institution, but in the broader academic disciplinary landscape; which professional and scholarly associations to be a part of; tactical advice around where to focus, timing, pros and cons; exploring bigger questions – why I am doing what I do; what I bring to academia; the kind of career want to have; helping me to tell my story, how present myself; growing capability to deal with tricky moments, such as work-life balance, difficult colleagues; managing transitions; identifying who can help.