Beginning the Mentoring Process with New Colleagues

1

Mentoring Matters

SoEv. 1.0

Contents

Introduction 2

1. Mentoring: What is it? 4
2. The mentoring role 6
3. Helping mentees find their way 9
4. Helping mentees set targets16
5. Helping mentees make progress18
6. Helping mentees be resilient22
7. Managing disagreement24
8. Becoming a better mentor25

Appendices29

Index39

Douglas P. Newton ©2015

ISBN 0 9531147 16

Introduction

Mentoring : A Departmental Policy

The Department, the Faculty, and the University benefit from good teaching, research and corporate citizenship in the particular ways expected in the University’s exacting environment. The School of Education recognises that support from a mentor has the potential to help colleagues become more effective in this work. It is, therefore, the Department’s policy to provide that support.

In particular, in the case of newly appointed academic members of staff and in accordance with University requirements, the School’s policy is to appoint mentors who will:

• guide new staff during the construction of their Probationary Agreement,
• advise their mentees on teaching, research and corporate citizenship,
• monitor progress towards the targets of the Probationary Agreement,
• advise mentees on the completion of the various Probationary Reports, and
• inform the Head of Department about progress towards that completion,

for the duration of the Probation.

To achieve these ends, the policy is to appoint one or two mentors who, alone or together, are able to cover each mentee’s contractual obligations. In accordance with University guidance on allocating mentors and as far as is possible, mentors will not be appointed from colleagues who are line managers of the mentee. It is also the Department’s policy to manage the mentor-mentee relationship in accordance with the University’s guidelines. In addition, it is the School’s policy to foster an understanding of the value of mentoring and the mentoring process amongst its staff. To that end, a designated person will oversee the mentoring of new academic staff, will disseminate mentoring information and good practice amongst its mentors, and encourage participation in further training. Prospective mentors will be encouraged to see successful participation in the mentoring system as a part of their career development and a worthy addition to their curriculum vitae.

In the case of experienced colleagues beyond Probation, it is also the School of Education’s policy to offer and make available on request mentoring of a less formal nature so that all academics have the opportunity to develop further skills and expertise and explore and develop opportunities from which they and the Department might benefit. Provision of this kind of mentoring depends on the nature of the perceived needs.

The aims of this resource

This short introduction describes the mentoring of academic staff, new and experienced. It may be used as:

• a source of information for those who have had the role of mentor before and simply wish to be reminded of the procedures, strategies and actions that the roles entails, and/or
• atraining manual for those new to the role.

This resource could be longer but few would have the time to read it if it was. At the risk of condescension, some suggestions for reflection are provided at the end of each section (Afterthoughts, indicated by ). I hasten to add that I recognise academics are well-practised in reflection but I am also aware that they are often very busy people. The Afterthoughts may give an immediate focus for thought for those who wish it. Otherwise, this offering could be treated as a resource to dip into as needed. Please do not hesitate to ask for advice or to contribute your successes to the store of good practice.

When mentoring those on probation, the University’s guidelines can be found at:

Please consult this site for further information and current forms relating to Probationary Agreements. Note that these forms change from time to time without notice so should be downloaded at the time of use. At the monitoring/submission points for those on probation, the Head of Department’s secretary can elaborate on and help with administrative requirements and is available at: . When mentoring other colleagues, the process is generally informal and does not normally involve the maintenance of records of this nature. For mentoring practices, Prof. Doug Newton is available at:

Mentoring matters!

But only if it is the right kind.

The mentor’s advice to Larry Wyler, a would-be writer who joined the staff of the New Yorker was:

‘Don’t leave your office unlocked. There’s a gun inthe desk, top right hand side drawer. Don’tshoot yourself in the foot. If you need paper, dial O for the office boy. If you need advice, call youruncle. They serve drinks downstairs in the library atfive o’clock.’ [1]

1. Mentoring: What is it?

The role of the mentor

First, thank you for agreeing to be a mentor. In the current climate, new colleagues are expected to perform at a high level very quickly. The University aims to support such staff partly through a mentoring system. The quality of this support can make a difference to new colleagues’ experience and success, particularly those who are relatively new to the role. Colleagues will be allocated at least one mentor. For instance, those with considerable experience at a similar institution may need little support to maintain their performance. Others, with a narrowly defined role, may have one mentor who provides guidance and advice. Other roles call for more than one mentor, typically, one for research-related matters and one for teaching and administration. You will be advised of the mentoring provision for your mentee.Clearly, when more than one mentor is involved, some liaison between participants will be needed. This part concerns itself with answering some questions often asked about mentoring.

What is a mentor?

In Ancient Greece, Mentor provided wise counsel to Telemachus. Mentor’s name is now commonly used to describe someone assigned to guide or advise another in his or her professional role. DurhamUniversity describes mentoring as:

‘An informal and supportive relationship whereby a more experienced member of staff undertakes to help a new member of staff to learn his/her job and understand its context.’

Mentoring, however, need not be confined to new members of staff. From time to time, others may also seek advice or guidance from a colleague. These two roles – helping new colleaguesand helping those who are past probation – overlap but have significant differences.

Other terms tend to be associated with the mentoring process, such as coaching. Here, coaching is taken to mean someone with a particular skill who provides practical instruction which leads to the development of that skill in the mentee. For example, a mentor might demonstrate and coach a mentee in a particular teaching skill or research method. Mentoring, however, is broader than that. In this context, the mentor is unlikely to have all the particular skills a given mentee wants and so, instead of coaching, would help a mentee acquire those skills from someone or somewhere else. Given the nature of academic life, it is expected that any academic mentee should be able to acquire skills and knowledge from a variety of sources in a variety of ways and without detailed instruction.

What is the role of mentor?

The view of mentoring taken here is that the mentor is not there to tell the mentee what to do. Instead, the mentor’s role is to help the mentee recognise what matters in their work and to develop and make the most of their interests, abilities, duties and responsibilities. The mentee is not the mentor’s apprentice, research assistant or helper; the aim is to help mentees perform well in their own right, with fewer false starts and discouraging experiences as might otherwise occur. The mentor, therefore, aims to facilitate, encourage, challenge, guide, and offer suggestions but does not direct or insist on a particular course of action.

Why be a mentor?

Mentoring can make a difference to:

• The mentee
• Mentees experience fewer, time wasting false starts, have fewer dispiriting experiences, become more confident and productive, perceive work more positively, and tend to stay in post longer.
• The mentor
• Mentors often find the role satisfying, find new perspectives on their work, tend to reflect more on their own practice, and, materially, can add theactivity to their CVs to indicate their contribution to University life.
• The Department and University
• Academics can be productive sooner and more productive overall and they show more commitment to the University.

Who chooses the mentor?

New colleagues have mentors allocated to them by the Head of Department at the time of appointment and according to anticipated roles, University policy, and recommendations for the selection of mentors for new staff[2]. As far as possible, line managers of the new colleague will not also be their mentors (or the only mentor). Where more than one mentor is appointed, their responsibilities will be complementary (e.g. one will deal with research or scholarly activity and the other with teaching and corporate citizenship, something a little wider than administration).

Staff beyond probation who wish to have an adviser, critical friend or, simply, someone to comment constructively on ideas may:

• ask a colleague to have or to continue in that role, or
• ask the Head of Department, the person in charge of mentoring, or the Directors of Education or Research/Scholarly Activity to recommend a colleague for the role.

This informal arrangement may last for whatever period of time is seen as appropriate. It may be as short as a day or last several months.

Mentoring is not for everyone. Simply being a good teacher, researcher or administrator is not sufficient. What a mentor says, or doesn’t say, can affect a mentee’s career, for good or ill. It is, therefore, a role which has to be played with due care and deliberation.

Can a mentor be changed?

This applies more to those with appointed mentors. Very rarely, the relationship may be unproductive. In this event, the mentee may request that a new mentor be appointed by the Head of Department. The request should be made either to the person i/c mentoring or the Head of Department.

Some Afterthoughts

The stage of career will affect the nature of the mentoring. In what ways?

Many people can be good mentors/mentees. What makes a bad mentor/mentee?

What qualities do you bring to the task of mentoring?

2 The Mentoring Role

Some notions of mentoring

Mentoring has the potential to contribute significantly to mentees’ success and workplace well-being but it can also be a Cinderella activity. There may have been a time when mentoring amounted to no more than showing a new colleague the location of the stationery cupboard and being available to answer other mundane questions. Now, more is expected but mentoring can still suffer from a belief that the role is occasional, mechanical, and even trivial. Here are a few comments about mentoring which reflect a variety of values:

• Is it really necessary? I never had a mentor and I was OK.
• Oh, no! Not more work? Do I get a Workload Allowance for it?
• Oh, I’m flattered. I’m pleased you think I’m up to being a mentor.
• Yes, I’ve reached the stage where I really should be contributing in that way.

Other conceptions of mentoring, although well-meaning, can produce lots of activity but not always useful activity. For instance, seeing mentoring as moulding others into your own, brilliant image (‘Follow me, I’m a leading light’), or seeing it as having chats about the good old days is unlikely to meet the needs of a mentee. The aim is to help the mentee make the most of his or her abilities. If what you do contributes to that, it is worthwhile.Mentors are not those who want to shape someone in their own image or simply those who ‘have walked the path before’, nor is mentoring a single role but many roles played as needed. Neither is someone a good mentor just because he or she is a senior or promoted member of staff.

Follow me, the leading lightAnecdotage

A Model of Academic Mentoring Needs in Higher Education

Mentoring in HE can be seen as having three elements: induction, developmental, and facilitative.

• Induction Mentoring

At its simplest, an induction mentor shows a new member of staff ‘the ropes and provides practical support’. Induction mentoring can help a newcomer function in a new environment and understand what is expected. As a probation mentor, mentoring can involve the construction of agreed targets in, for instance, a Probationary Agreement and Personal Research Plan, and the monitoring and reporting of progress through the Six-Month Review, Interim Probationary Report and Final Probationary Report. The mentee may also be expected or advised to attend training courses, such as the PGCap or a specific course on administrative matters, or obtain membership of a professional body, such as the HEA.

• DevelopmentalMentoring

Developmental mentoring goes beyond simple induction mentoring in that it seeks to develop the skills needed in each of the strands of academic activity. This generally involves exploring a mentee’s professional interests, strengths and needs and then helping them to acquire and demonstrate knowledge, understanding and expertise as appropriate. This can be less formal than Induction Mentoring but, as indicated in the diagram, the two overlap as one can inform the other.

• Facilitative Mentoring

Facilitative mentoring generally aims to help someone with expertise and experience to make progress, overcome a particular obstacle or work through a mental blockage. For instance, it is not unusual for an academicto mine out an idea and then find it difficult to find another direction, or shemight experience a frustrating setback which obscures her view of alternative courses of action. Although it shares features with developmental mentoring, its goal is often to find a new way forward or re-establish productivity in a new area or in a different way. Alternatively, a successful academic may take on a significant managerial role, such as that of Head of Department or Director of a section. Some aspects of the role are likely to be unfamiliar and, to some extent, they may be learned by shadowing the existing post-holder. Nevertheless, there will be times when the new manager could benefit from a sounding board, a constructive listener, even cautionary adviser. Like others, there will be times when they could profit from some form of peer mentoring. For example, leadership is a part of many forms of management but it involves gaining trust. Trust takes time to develop and yet is very quickly lost. Dysfunctional behaviours which lose it may not be evident to the would-be leader but could be to a mentor[3].

As the diagram indicates, these three elements are not mutually exclusive. A new, early career colleague will usually need at least Induction Mentoring and Developmental Mentoring. An experienced colleague may appreciate a period of Facilitative Mentoring but that may call for some Developmental suggestions.

Mentoring can also be directed at furthering the interests of a particular group. For example, the University currently offers a Women in Academia Mentoring Programme to support the career development of female academics. Mentors for this purpose are drawn from academic staff across the University. For further information, see the University’s Intranet.

Some qualities of a mentor

Mentoring can be both interesting and rewarding. It calls for qualities and skills which most of us have although years of working in a highly competitive environment may have left them unused or even encouraged them to wither. This does not mean they cannot be practised and deployed again. What is needed depends on how you view the role of mentoring but a list of qualities or skills could include, for example:

• Having some generosity of spirit.
• Being a credible role model.
• Being able to listen, not just hear.
• Being able to respond without prescription.
• Being interested in others’ ideas.
• Knowing when to take a back seat.
• Having reasonable expectations.
• Having integrity.
• Being able to observe confidentiality.
• Being able to be impartial.
• Seeing the role as worthwhile.
• Giving the work the time it needs.

None of these is intrinsically difficult or cannot be developed with practice.

Some qualities of a mentee

Of course, the mentor-mentee relationship is not one-sided; mentees benefit if they have or quickly develop certain qualities, such as:

• Being able to listen to and reflect on what is said.
• Being self-motivating.
• Being proactive.
• Being able to take another’s perspective.

Afterthought

This model of HE mentoring focuses thought on the balance of needs colleagues may have at different stages in their careers. Can HE mentoring be usefully described in other ways?

3 Helping mentees find their way

Some general principles

Whether your mentee is new to academic life or experienced, there are some general recommendations:

1. Make the purpose of mentoring clear.

Explain your role and, if appropriate, formal, University requirements to your mentee. Agree broad goals and practices – the ground rules.

1. Arrange and plan meetings and give them plenty of time.

A hurried exchange of words in a corridor is not mentoring. Meet in a place where interruptions are unlikely and remember the purpose of the meeting.

1. Listen, listen, listen.

Too often, we believe we know the solution and want to impose it. Solutions work better when they come from the mentee, at least in part. Suggest rather than tell and be patient.