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Panning for Insight

The Art of Mentoring

Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.

Abigail Adams (1780)

Panning for gold is a lot like mentoring. It is not always easy. Panning for gold works like this. First, you put a double handful of sand in a heavy-gauge steel shallow pan and dip it in the water, filling it half full of water. Next, you gently move the pan back and forth as you let small amounts of yellow sand wash over the side of the pan.

The objective is to let the black sand sink to the bottom of the gold pan. But this is the point where panning for gold gets real serious. Impatience or strong-arming the way the pan is shaken means the black sand escapes over the side along with the yellow sand. Once black sand is the only sand left in the pan, you are rewarded with flecks of gold. The gold resides among the black sand.

Mentoring can be like panning for gold among the sand. Insight is generally not lying on top ready to be found and polished. If it were easy pickings, the help of a mentor would be unnecessary. It lies beneath the obvious and ordinary. It is lodged in the dark sands of irrational beliefs, myths, fears, prejudices, and biases. It lurks under untested hunches, ill-prepared starts, and unfortunate mistakes. Helping the protégé extract insight takes patience and persistence. It cannot be rushed and haphazardly forced. And, most of all, it cannot be strong-armed with the force of the mentor. It must be discovered by the protégé with the guidance of the mentor.

As a mentor, you are in charge of getting the protégé to properly shake the pan. You help the protégé learn to recognize the real treasures of insight and understanding and not be seduced by “fool’s gold”—achieved by rote and temporarily retained only “until the exam is over.” The way you help the protégé handle the dark sand is central to the acquisition of wisdom. That is the essence of mentoring with a partnership philosophy.

What is the nature of your responsibility? The whole concept of mentor has had a checkered path in the world of work. The most typical mental image has been that of a seasoned corporate sage conversing with a naïve, wet-behind-the-ears young recruit. The conversation would probably have been laced with informal rules, closely guarded secrets, and “I remember back in ’77 … ” stories of daredevil heroics and too-close-to-call tactics. And work-based mentoring has had an almost heady, academic sound, reserved solely for workers in white collars whose fathers advised, “Get to know ol’ Charlie.”

In recent years the term “mentor” became connected less with privilege and more with affirmative action. An organization viewed as a part of its responsibility enabling minority employees through a mentor to expedite their route through glass ceilings, beyond old-boy networks and the private winks formerly reserved for WASP males. Such mentoring sponsors sometimes salved the consciences of those who bravely talked goodness but became squeamish if expected to spearhead courageous acts. These mentoring programs sounded contemporary and forward-thinking. Some were of great service, but many were just lip service.

But what are the role and responsibility of mentoring, really? When the package is unwrapped and the politically correct is scraped away, what’s left? A mentor is defined in the dictionary as “a wise, trusted advisor … a teacher or coach.” Such a simple definition communicates a plain-vanilla context. In case you missed the preface, mentoring is defined as that part of the leader’s role that has learning as its primary outcome. Bottom line, a mentor is simply someone who helps someone else learn something that would have otherwise been learned less well, more slowly, or not at all. Notice the power-free nature of this definition; mentors are not power figures.

The traditional use of the word “mentor” denotes a person outside one’s usual chain of command—from the junior’s point of view, someone who “can help me understand the informal system and offer guidance on how to be successful in this crazy organization.” Not all mentors are supervisors or managers, but most effective supervisors and managers act as mentors. Mentoring is typically focused on one person; group mentoring is training or teaching. We will focus on the one-to-one relationship; the others are beyond the scope of this book.

Good leaders do a lot of things in the organizations they inhabit. Good leaders communicate a clear vision and articulate a precise direction. Good leaders provide performance feedback, inspire and encourage, and, when necessary, discipline. Good leaders also mentor. Once more, mentoring is that part of a leader’s role that has growth as its primary outcome.