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.

Are You Ready?

A mentoring relation ship is not something to take lightly. Many people see the advantages of a mentoring relationship, but they aren’t fully prepared to take advantage of it. Below are some things that will help you decide if you are prepared to be either a mentee or a mentor:

For the Mentee

• Are you prepared to take an active role in developing yourself as a writer, speaker or whatever area of development you have?
• Do you know what you hope to gain from the mentoring relationship?
• Do you know what is preventing you from reaching your goals?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?
• Have you considered what it is that your mentor can do to help you?
• Are you willing to listen with an open mind to suggestions your mentor makes? Are you willing to try the suggestions before dismissing them?
• Do you have time to spend improving and working with your mentor?

For the Mentor

• Do you have an interest in the success of your mentee?
• Are you willing to use your contacts in the industry to help your mentee?
• Do you have time for this?
• Are you looking for ways to be a better mentor?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?

Personality Tests

At some point in your life, you have probably taken a personality test of some point. Schools often give personality tests to help their students decide what they want to do with their lives. Churches will sometimes give personality tests to assess a person’s spiritual gifts. Businesses will give personality tests to help access how to utilize the skill sets they have available. You have probably heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies each person into 16 personality types based on their preferences.

Personality tests can be useful in a mentoring situation. No personality test is completely accurate, but they can be a good starting point from which a mentor and mentee can get to know more about each other. Personality tests can also help to identify areas the mentee needs to work on. The demands of the writing career make it such that the extravert tends to succeed where the introvert does not. The judging personality may have advantages and disadvantages that the perceiving personality does not. Using his or her knowledge of the mentee’s personality, the mentor can then help to identify traits that the mentee can take advantage of as well as identify traits they he must work to overcome.

What Mentoring Isn’t

Some people go into a mentoring relationship with unrealistic expectations of what it should be. The following is a list of things that mentoring isn’t:

• A Guarantee for a Book Contract
• A Relationship that Lasts Forever
• A substitute for reading books and/or attending conferences to learn how to write, submit queries, market books etc.
• A way to get someone to edit your work for you.
• A method of getting a good ideas that agents and publishers will jump on.
• A substitute for building a platform.