Mentoring

• "According to Schein (1978, p. 178), the role of the mentor changes depending on the managerial skills outcome desired by the protégé. To illustrate his point, he identifies several roles a mentor might play in a relationship: (a) a teacher, coach, trainer uses basic skills and content training; (b) a protector role arises when mentees are ready to take on new roles and risk; (c) a role model relies on shadowing--the mentee is able to watch the mentor in action during hands-on live work situations; (d) a developer of talent involves giving special assignments such as serving on a task force representing the college to outside groups; (e) an opener of doors helps to position a protégé with opportunities for visibility, such as key committee appointments, conference attendance, and paper presentations; and finally, (f) a provider of inspiration motivates the protégé while encouraging personal and professional development" (Valeau, 1999).
• Enhance mentoring programs for tenure-track faculty (University of Colorado at Boulder, Campus Diversity Plan: A Blueprint for Action, July, 1999).
• To help retain women and minority faculty, implement mentoring programs to reduce isolation and alienation. Not only should departments assign a more senior faculty member to help the new member, it should also construct a university initiated effort to support and enhance the new faculty member's experience during the first few years. It is vital to include college- or university-level efforts in mentoring because many departments may only have one female or minority faculty member of be too small to offer adequate, unbiased mentoring (Phillips, 2002).
• Experienced members of the faculty, especially women or minority professors already in the department, should be encouraged to function as unofficial mentors for newly hired women and minorities (Ohio State University Handbook, 1988).
• As mentors, senior professors may provide guidance for their teaching by examining their syllabi, teaching materials, and examinations as well as by visiting their classes (Ohio State University Handbook, 1988).
• Mentors may also provide an evaluation of their research when it is an early state of development, offer suggestions for future scholarly activities and research planning, counsel one on participation in professional organizations and conferences, and offer advice on the pursuit of university and external funding for research (Ohio State University Handbook, 1988).
• Mentors can discuss with new faculty the unique demands on their time which they will confront in their department and in the community and how to balance those demands with their teaching and researching responsibilities (Ohio State University Handbook, 1988).
• Mentors may be able to reduce the sense of social isolation often experienced by new faculty. Inviting new colleagues to lunch or to social functions will help them feel that they are fully involved in the life of an academic community (Ohio State University Handbook, 1988).
• Create multicultural summer research/teaching fellowship programs, which may be designed to allow a faculty member of color to mentor diverse candidates prior to their arrival at the institutions (Zamboanga & Bingman, 2001).
• Encourage senior faculty members to reach out to junior colleagues with different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Alger, 2000)

"Several critical success factors are necessary to becoming an effective mentor. They include the following:

• A genuine willingness to help someone else succeed,
• A high degree of self-confidence, respect and tolerance for other points of view,
• A positive attitude toward working with people of different cultural backgrounds,
• A demonstrated interest in working with minorities and women,
• A solid understanding and intellectual grounding in one's field, and
• A penchant for making a difference" (Valeau, 1999).

"Strengths of the Mentor Program included providing protégés with the following:

• New, professionally strengthening experiences,
• Improved people skills,
• Opportunities to develop contacts and network,
• Fair treatment
• A strengthened resolve to be an administrator" (Valeau, 1999).

• Recruit mentors from former protégés (Keefe, 2003).
• New faculty need mentors outside the department, whom they can count on as advocates, because junior faculty are most afraid of senior faculty in the same department, who will vote on their promotions and tenure (Keefe, 2003).
• "Encourage new comers to find informal mentors in addition to their formal ones, aiming for up to three in a mix of departments" (Keefe, 2003).
• ". . . the most important advice a mentor can give an untenured colleague is how to balance his or her time. Mentors need to guide protégés not to let teaching and service crowd out research (Keefe, 2003).
• When mentors and protégés get acquainted they should clarify their common values and agree how they'll work together (Keefe, 2003).

Ideas for mentors:

• Meet over breakfast or lunch.
• Take your protégé along to a meeting.
• Have your protégé help you on a project.
• Introduce your protégé to others.
• Point your protégé toward other resources (Keefe, 2003).

• Minority protégés should be mentored very differently from their white counterparts (Thomas, 2001).
• Thomas (2001) found that people of color who advance the furthest all share one characteristic - a strong network of mentors and corporate sponsors who nurture their professional development.
• A mentor of a professional of color must be aware of the challenges race can present to his protégé's career development and advancement and must understand how people of color tend to climb the corporate ladder (Thomas, 2001).
• A mentor must play the dual role of coach and counselor: coaches give technical advice, explaining how to do something, while counselors talk about the experience of doing it and offer emotional support (Thomas, 2001).
• Organizations can educate managers about their developmental role and by teaching them how to mentor effectively (Thomas, 2001).
• Mentors should understand the kinds of developmental relationships that people need at different points in their careers (Thomas, 2001).
• Mentors need to have an understanding that race and racism can pose significant obstacles for people of color, therefore, mentors of minorities may need to approach mentoring differently than they do with white protégés (Thomas, 2001).

A significant amount of research shows that cross-race and cross-gender mentoring relationships can have difficulty forming, developing, and maturing. A number of obstacles can hinder cross-race mentoring from reaching its full potential. The participants must overcome the following potential obstacles:

• Negative stereotypes - A prospective mentor should not withhold support until the prospective protégé has proven herself worthy of investment. On the other hand, when a person of color feels that he won't be given the benefit of the doubt, hen may behave in certain ways.
• Identification and role modeling - If a mentor has trouble identifying with his protégé, then he might not be able to see beyond the protégé's weaknesses. Also, when the mentoring relationship is across race, the mentor will often have certain limitations as a role model. That is, if the protégé adopts the behavior of the mentor, it might produce different results.
• Skepticism about intimacy - At companies without a solid track history of diversity, people might question whether close, high-quality relationships across race are possible.
• Public scrutiny - Because cross-race relationships are rare in most organizations, they tend to be more noticeable, so people focus on them. The possibility of such scrutiny will often discourage people from participating in a cross-race relationship in the first place.
• Peer resentment - A protégé's peers can easily become jealous, prompting them to suggest or imply that the protégé does not deserve whatever benefits he's received. Someone who fears such resentment might avoid forming a close relationship with a prospective mentor of another race (Thomas, 2001).
• According to Thomas (2001), many cross-race mentoring relationships suffer from "protective hesitation," where "both parties refrain from raising touchy issues."
• "Minorities tend to advance further when their white mentors understand and acknowledge race as a potential barrier . . . In other words, relationships in which protégé and mentor openly discuss racial issues generally translate into greater opportunity for the protégé. To encourage and foster that type of mentoring, organizations can teach people, especially managers, how to identify and surmount various race-related difficulties." (Thomas, 2001).
• "If a mentor accepts that he might be limited in his ability to serve as a role model, he can help his protégé identify other appropriate people" (Thomas, 2001).
• A mentor can offer open-ended advice, perhaps by using qualifying comments ("This might not work for you, but from my experience ...") and invite discussion of the advice rather than assume it will be taken. Otherwise, the mentor might easily misconstrue situations when his advice isn't taken, which could make the mentor feel slighted and possibly even cause him to abandon the relationship (Thomas, 2001).
• One of a mentor's key tasks is to help the protégé build a large and diverse network of relationships. The network must be strong enough to withstand even the loss of the mentor (Thomas, 2001).
• “The most effective network is heterogeneous along three dimensions. First, the network should have functional diversity; it should include mentors, sponsors, role models, peers, and even people whom the protégés themselves might be developing mentoring relationships toward. Second, the network should have variety with respect to position (seniors, colleagues, and juniors) as well as location (people within the immediate department, in other departments, and outside the organization).
• And third, the network should be demographically mixed in terms of race, gender, age, and culture” (Thomas, 2001).
  ". . . if a mentor notices that his protégé is not part of an informal go-to-lunch crowd, he might assign her to a certain project with people in that group to encourage those friendships to form" (Thomas, 2001).

"Mentors, especially those at the executive level, must do much more by actively supporting broader efforts and initiatives at their organizations to help create the conditions that foster the upward mobility of people of color. Specifically, they can do the following:

• Ensure that the pool of people being considered for promotions and key assignments reflects the diversity in the organization.
  Promote executive development workshops and seminars that address racial issues.
• Support in-house minority associations, including networking groups.
• Help colleagues manage their discomfort with race. In a meeting to decide whether someone of color should be promoted, for example, a person can help focus the discussion on the individual's actual performance while discounting racial issues disguised as legitimate concerns (such as vague criticisms that the managerial style of the minority candidate 'doesn't fit in').
  Challenge implicit rules, such as those that assume that people who weren't fast movers early in their careers will never rise to the executive suites" (Thomas, 2001).
• "Some mentoring programs are highly structured with formal training for mentees and mentors; other programs involve mentoring circles where a single mentor meets with a group of mentees. This approach has the advantages of reducing the time burden on mentors and providing opportunities for peer support" (Salomon & Schork, 2003).
• The functions of mentors include opening doors, providing learning opportunities, helping expand an individual's contributions to the organization, and providing a secure area in which to brainstorm ideas and solve problems (Salomon & Schork, 2003).

"Tips for Mentors:

1. Be a role model and an enabler to help each individual achieve his or her personal goals.
2. Give positive and corrective guidance and feedback.
3. Expose mentees to a wide range of growth activities and challenging assignments.
4. Help mentees envision a course of action, develop the plan, and execute it.
5. Teach mentees to constructively question and probe and not to be afraid to challenge the status quo.
6. Encourage mentees to take charge of their own careers and to ask and demand more from themselves than from others.
7. Encourage mentees to exceed their own expectations.
8. Encourage mentees to seek intrinsic satisfaction from work accomplishments.
9. Help mentees develop personal commitment and a positive attitude, even when their actions result in failure.
10. As the mentor, be honest, give constructive feedback and demonstrate your confidence and trust in the mentees' abilities and efforts" (Gant, 2000).

• "A mentoring program would allow black women who have an interest in upper level positions access to skills and knowledge needed to succeed in those positions, as well as providing guidance and support" (Banner, 2003).
• "Senior faculty initiate informal mentoring when they see themselves in a junior colleague." Since most senior faculty are men, men tend to receive the most mentoring. "Senior women who mentor many young women face overload . . . Departments can ease the bind with a formal mentoring program that assigns both female and male mentors" ("How to avoid," 2003).
• "Non-faculty African American women administrators need to be mentored not only by other black women, but also by other campus mentors regardless of their gender or race" (Boyd, 2003).