Mentoring Means Modeling

by Dr. Brian J. Mistler

September 5th, 2006

I’m occasionally asked by leaders, teachers, and students about the essential qualities of mentoring — and for me it’s modeling. I suggest that, “mentoring means modeling”. And, the lack of this critical modeling component in the educational system may explain why so many people are unprepared for success in the work-force. If you’re a young person just entering the business world, or a seasoned leader interested in the value of hiring people with internship experience, read on.

I’m a strong believer, like Aristotle, William James and some others before me, that there are at least three kinds of knowledge a teacher passes on to his/her student; training in facts (declarative), training in skills (procedural) which includes reasoning, and training in being. My personal experience has been a focus through most of my education on declarative, starting shortly after I learned to tie my shoes and write the letter Z, and continuing disappointingly even into most of my Graduate experiences.

Fortunately, our educational system today includes some small component of focus on procedural knowledge, but much of this seems to be ‘accidental’. The processes for the critical skills needed to succeed in most of today’s growing fields seem to be developed by people as a necessity at the point of the task, but never addressed meaningfully in the curriculum. In many business and liberal arts schools alike they are offered the basic materials (declarative) of success, and plenty of wonderful examples of the successful outcomes in the form of faculty and CEO success stories, but the process of getting there is too often in shadows (forgive me, as a consultant, I’m often a process guy).

The human species has recognized for generations, hasn’t it, the difficulty of making such procedural skills explicit, especially when the varying circumstances of implementation in the real world are at odds with the kind of universal abstraction we might try to teach in our universities. At some point the wisest among us instituted formal apprenticeships and mentoring as a blessing on everyone’s house.

However, as instantiated through most of my education and professional life, I’ve struggled with craving one component of apprenticeship most — wishing the opportunity to observe my mentors performing their vocation. To see experts I admire doing things — talking with a customer, sharing ideas in a marketing meeting, hiring, firing, and all the grit of leadership and management that comes in-between. This is absolutely critical for me, and the system I have experienced in most of my training (after we get past educator as power-point developer) is mentor as ’supervisor’ — assigning tasks (input this data, read these articles, get this done by Tuesday), or as an expert mirror providing feedback (this gets an A, do this differently, good work today), or perhaps soliciting self-reflection (what were you thinking?). These are all valuable, but I hope you’ll consider, lack the pre-requisite modeling step.

If you were trying to explain this to an audience, I might say imagine the ideal process as riding with your mentor to their house, and then switching seats, having them assist from the passenger seat, and finally, when you’re ready, being available by phone (or e-mail) when you get lost. To so many of my great teachers’ credit I’ve felt wonderfully supported in these last two steps. Yet, imagine the difficulties incurred by skipping the first step of modeling — your mentor is still there to say “you’re hot, you’re cold”, “turn here”, and even when they’re not in the car to get across the mentor as OnStar message, “I’m here to support you, you’ve got a net” — yet, while all this is important to the development of an independent driver, it’s so much less efficient without the first step of modeling to seed the process.

For this reason, the opportunity to observe my mentors modeling the various components of whatever vocation they’re experienced in, and which I aspire to, is for me (and psychologists who’ve studied it for 30 years like Albert Bandura) an indispensable component of passing on knowledge.

In short, if you want to train people to do anything really well, at some point, it helps a lot to put them with someone already doing that thing with excellence, and let them watch. Too often we show our trainees people who have DONE it, and try to tell them why we think it worked. And, if you find someone with internship experience — with practice doing the job you want them to do — grab them!

“Mentoring means modeling,” might well be the sine qua non mantra of excellence in higher education and successful business training. John Spence has written another excellent article on the topic of mentoring, which may certainly be worth your time to read. I also encourage your comments below.

Article Filed under: Business Excellence