3 Kinds of Mentorship

What is mentoring?

There are 3 kinds of mentorship from my past observations. However, what does a mentor mean to you? According to Oxford Dictionary, a mentor is “an experienced person who advises and helps somebody with less experience over a period of time.” Do you believe in having a mentor? Have you experienced good mentoring? I believe that most of us either never have a mentor or have not experienced good mentoring because good mentors rarely exist.

 At one point or another, we have experienced some sort of mentoring in a very loose sense of the word. I would regard mentoring to be much more than just teaching or some random guidance given.

In mentoring, some sort of relationship has to be built and emotional bonding has to be formed. A mentor has to have much interactions with his/her protege and close watching over the protege’s performance.

A modern day school teacher is not a mentor to his students because mentoring is not merely teaching. However, a teacher can become a mentor to some of his/her students, if he/she chooses to do so. Teaching students a subject is not mentoring. Mentoring would have to also involve instilling in students the fundamentals of learning, grooming their character, watching how the students learn and perform and correcting them. It is an intimate and intricate process. Nevertheless, in today’s time and age, we are too busy with too little time. There is possibly no time and space for such high level mentoring. Well, my expectations are high.

Why do you need to be mentored?

Rightfully, the reason is because you are inexperienced and inadequate in a certain skill. In Toastmasters, a new member can request for a mentor. The mentor will help the new member with his/her public speaking in preparing his/her first few prepared speech projects.

Were you ever mentored? Did you ask to be mentored?

For me, these two questions are personal to everyone. In a certain sense, I have been mentored but in a stricter sense of the word, I was not and I did not ever asked to be mentored. A need for mentorship is situational. If you are in an environment where you need to develop some new skills or better still, some inward growth is needed in order to fulfil your purpose, you need to be mentored. However, there may not be a qualified mentor to help you.

In my opinion, there are 3 kinds of mentorship:

• assigned mentorship
• assumed mentorship
• admired mentorship

Assigned Mentorship

Assigned mentorship occur usually in an organisation particularly where you work to get your pay. A person new to a job might be assigned a senior to guide him/her on how to do the job. The problem of assigned mentorship in a job is three-fold.

• The mentor may not necessarily be good at doing those things that he/she is supposed to guide the protege in. This is simply bureaucracy and it is just duty to be fulfilled. To the mentor, this is an extra burden with no credit to be taken. The task is probably randomly assigned, not unless the organisation has specially designated seniors who are deemed to be experts and one of their major functions in the organisation is to mentor younger employees.
  
• The mentor may not know how to impart the knowledge properly to the protege. Not everyone is a natural born teacher. In some case, some “mentors” merely throw his/her works to the younger employees and let them fumble their way through. They even believe that for someone to learn, you simply have to get your hands dirty. This form of guidance may be adequate for some job but it is nothing more than showing someone what are the things to be done rather than how they are to be done. Anyone can pick up the trades without any impartation of deeper knowledge. In such cases, there is no need for mentorship. I would rather call that shadowing.
  
• It may not be in the interest of the mentor to groom the protege if there is a potential for the protege to compete with the mentor in future. This scenario is unfortunate. The assigned mentor may intentionally mislead the “protege” and even bullying can occur.

Assumed Mentorship

This form of mentorship occur in a setting where you are not in a formal organisation where you and your mentor are employees of the organisation. However, there is some form of hierarchy in this organisation, say a network marketing company.

In a network marketing company, you have a sponsor, also known as an upline. Your sponsor is supposed to teach you the tricks of the trade, how the company operates and how to promote your business. Your performance will directly affects his commissions.

However, he is not your paymaster. From this perspective, he somewhat owes you a responsibility to mentor you. On the other hand, you need not listen to him because he does not pay you.

Nevertheless, hierarchically he is above you and so if he is unwise, he thinks that he is your “boss” and behaves like your commander.

Let me share my experience in a hierarchical network that I am in, which is not a network marketing company. The person who introduced me into the network thought to himself that he has to mentor me, despite the fact that he knows little and does not even has his own act together.

In other words, he ASSUMED that he is my mentor and that I SHOULD listen to him. He began telling me how I should keep my hair and even suggested that I wear a wig. He instructed me on how I should not dress and how many times I should bathe in a day. He told me that I should refrain from dressing too formally. Neither should I wear Adidas apparels because in his opinion, they are meant for youths and sportsmen. He even forbade me from wearing black.

There was once when we went shopping for a T-shirt and he told me that I should not buy a black T-shirt and I could see that he was going to pick a PINK T-shirt for me. I said, “I do not wear pink!” Either he was ignoring me or was too self-absorbed to hear what I was saying, I kept repeating those words, each time getting louder even as I felt my blood rising to a boiling temperature. I was reaching the point of shouting at the top of my voice in the shop, which I did not, but it was loud enough to arrest his attention and woke him up from his state of self-absorption.

As you can see in what I have shared here, my “assumed mentor” did not guide me on things that really matter but on things that are superficial. Even then, it is purely his personal opinion and inclination that I beg to differ, greatly. I would have been more receptive if I were working in a large corporation and he was my superior telling me how to dress on the job because my dressings would have projected the image of the corporation. However in our case, it is not! I hope that you can see that he has focused on the form and not the substance, because he does not have any substance to impart.

Another experience I had was when I received a phone call from an ex-student. It was explicitly clear that he had just joined a network marketing company and he was either asking me to join him or to be his customer. From the way he talked, he sounded like he had a script and his “mentor” was next to him, guiding him on what to say to whichever reply I gave him. It was quite clear because the call was impersonal and was greatly lacking in sensitivity. He would not take “no” for an answer no matter how I was appealing to his senses. I happened to be in a very depressed moment of my life and I told him that but yet he kept pushing on. Whoever his “mentor” was, from his mentoring, this ex-student of mine would probably end up either losing or souring his relationship with anybody he has ever known.

Admired Mentorship

Admired mentorship happens in a relationship where you know of someone that you greatly respect and would love to be able to be moulded into his/her image. He/she is not someone who is assigned to be your mentor nor did he assumed to be your mentor. In the case where such a person is either assigned or assumed to be your mentor, then your lucky star must be shining brightly, extremely. You would love to be mentored by him/her. You might ask to be mentored by him/her or perhaps you could choose to just observe that person you greatly admire quietly, adopt his/her values and do the things the same way he/she does his/her things. You see the substance and you follow in his/her footsteps, make adjustment to yourself, become a better person. Have you ever heard, “Children do not do what they are told but what they see?” That statement does not apply just to children but to everyone.

I once had a cell group leader in church. He could see the positive aspects and strength of everyone. He always had something good to say about everyone. In case you are thinking that he is unrealistically positive and hopelessly optimistic, he is not. There were people that he had discerned very rationally to have great shortcomings too. He is a married man with two young kids. Unlike most married people who are buried in their own world and are too caught up with their own family, he always had time for everyone.

After church service on Sunday, his wife would bring the kids home and he would stay with his cell group members, both past and present cell groups, to fellowship. In turn his cell group members, either married or single, would also fellowship with him. Associating with him, everyone was cheerful and positive and he seemed to draw out the hidden strength in everyone. The group was cohesive and the bond was strong. The relationship among the cell group members was positive but it was an outflow from him to the members.

After cell group meeting, he would choose to drive me home and it was never too late for him to detour to somewhere else to have roti prata for supper. He was not someone who would think or say, “It is very late already. You better get home and rest. I too have to go home to my wife and kids.” I believe what he was thinking was, “It is never too late to spend time with you, my brother. I would gladly invest time in you and know more about you.”

At the same time, he is not someone who neglects his wife and children. His family is bonded strongly together nor did he leave everything concerning the children and home matters to his wife alone. He had a difficult boy but he never hesitated to correct him promptly and consistently. His children have all grown up well and are married today.

Uneventfully, within less than a year that I came to know him, he had to leave us as his job required him to be posted to Kuala Lumpur. Nevertheless, whenever he stopped by Singapore, he would give us a call to meet him at his hotel. There were times when I had been running around and I had just reached home all tired out, I would receive a sudden call from him. “Daniel, I am now in Garden Hotel, come over and meet me.” I would do it because it was our bonding. He never felt that it is something too much to ask for after all he never felt it was too much what he had done for us.

Count it a privilege that he had chosen to spend the time with me alone. Other times, his room would be crowded with his friends in the night. In his absence, the bonding among the members was broken. We all stayed in Singapore and yet we had never met up with one another in his absence. However, we were all assembled in his hotel room just to meet him. He even said that he had to break us up into batches to meet on different nights because the crowd was overwhelming. From time to time, some of us would travel all the way up to Kuala Lumpur to meet him and stayed at his place.

It had been decades since I knew him and I have grown much. I began to feel that our opinions differ greatly. I have found him to be very subjective and very biased too. Nevertheless, I had observed him in the past and learned from him what made him a great leader and how he bind people towards him together like a family. Those were his strengths. No man is perfect. Learn to take the meat and leave the bones.

Remember in mentoring, “What I do not have, I cannot give. What is not a part of myself, I cannot impart.”