Formal or Informal

This blog has talked a lot about the formal mentoring relationship, but we often find ourselves in informal mentoring relationships as well. Which is better?  There may not be a good answer to that. In the formal mentoring relationship, there is a special emphasis on the development of the mentee involving what the mentee sees as his needs for development. In the informal relationship, the mentor may give the mentee advice many times or just once. Things are much more relaxed and it could be that the mentor or the mentee is no fully aware that he or she is in a mentoring relationship at all. The mentor may see something that the mentee is doing and feel the need to offer advice. Or the mentee may need help and asks questions of the mentor. Neither actually asks to begin a mentoring relationship.

There is room for both types of relationships. If the mentee is seeking ongoing help to improve an area of his life, the formal mentoring relationship is better because it gives both people a chance to set their goals for the relationship. If the mentee is just seeking occasional help, the informal relationship is better.

A Different Point of View

Whether you are the mentee or the mentor in the relationship, one of the benefits of a mentoring relationship is that it will give you the benefit of a different point of view. Most of the time, we spend out time hanging out with people who are a lot like us. We work with people having a similar educational background. In our free time, we go to places where there are other people who enjoy the same things. We worship with people who have similar beliefs to our own. We tend to read books written by people who agree with us. It is easy for us to assume that everyone is just like us.

I was in a formal mentoring relationship during a time that I was involved with making plans for celebrating our pastor having been the pastor of our church for fifty years. At dinner with my mentor one day, I mentioned this. He told me about their church and how that their pastors move from church to church. I don't remember how often he said that happens, but I seems like it was a less than ten year and maybe less than five year period. They have some kind of organization that makes the decisions about which person will pastor each church. That was strange to this Baptist's ears, since most Baptist churches view the local assembly as being the highest earthly authority and each body chooses their own pastor. But that isn't how all denominations do it.

The point is that the mentoring relationship exposed me to a concept that I wouldn't have known much about if I hadn't been in it. It didn't change my opinion on the subject, but it did help me to see that other people may not see church in quite the same way as I do. As writers, that is important to us. Things like that flavor our characters' lives. A character may respond to a situation differently if he knows his pastor is going to be leaving in a few months than what he might if the only way the pastor will leave is if the pastor feels the need to leave or the church kicks him out. Some readers may find our writing to come across oddly if we assume the understand the way things work and the reader knows they work another way. Today, it is almost comical to see the way writers used to write about computers, when they understood very little. Spending time in a mentoring relationship is one way to learn more about things we don't understand.

Performance Evaluation: Mentee

Don’t expect your mentor to evaluate your performance and don’t ask him to. Putting the mentor in that position makes things difficult for both people. It will almost always leave you, the mentee, feeling down. Your mentor is better than you in the area you are trying to improve, so he is likely to notice problems rather than being impressed with your skill. If he gives you an evaluation, you will feel like you can’t do anything right. The mentor also finds it difficult because he doesn’t want to tear you down, but he also wants to be honest.

Instead of putting your mentor in that situation, do an honest self evaluation before you meet with your mentor. If you are trying to improve your writing, for example, you might pick out some of the paragraphs from your work and say, “I think I could do better with these, but I’m not sure how.” If you are trying to improve your work ethic, you might mention some of the times you didn’t spend as much time writing as you think you should have and ask your mentor what you can do to improve. When you evaluate yourself, you own the evaluation and are much more willing to find a way to improve.

Performance Evaluation: Mentor

Imagine that you are a mentor and your mentee has asked you to help him develop his speaking ability. You know that he is going to be speaking for a crowd of about three hundred people, so rather than telling him that you will be there, you slip in, find a seat at the back and listen to him speak. He is terrible. So what should you tell him the next time you meet?

The mentor should not evaluate the performance of the mentee. Consider how the mentee will react if you meet with him and say, “You did it all wrong. You looked at your notes too much. You never made eye contact. You stood too far away from the microphone. The jokes at the beginning were lame. People were asking where they got this guy.” The mentee is going to leave that meeting feeling like he can do anything right and he won’t know how he can fix it.

Do this instead. First, ask the mentee how he thought he did. If he says that he thought he did okay, ask him to put a list of things in order from the weakest to the strongest. In this case, the list would include such things as eye contact, connecting with the audience, use of notes, etc. Then take what he considers to be the weakest and discuss what he can do to make it stronger. This way, he doesn’t feel that you are telling him that he is terrible, but he see you as helping him in an area where he knows he can benefit from improvement.