Let Time Pass before Follow-Up

The quickest route to delivering a message of dependence is to follow up with a protégé too soon after departure. Wait a week or more before calling or visiting. Setting your relationship free takes space and time. Should you follow up at all? Absolutely! Partners follow up on partners. The key is, not too quickly. Allow weaning time.

Let your protégé be his or her own person. There may be times when a former protégé is being honored and you will feel the urge to share the limelight. We know a professor who always wanted to share the credit when one of his students achieved some award. While pride was obviously a part of his response—“I was his major professor”—the action tended to keep his former protégé stuck in the “I’m still his student” position. Let go. Move on. Celebrate the past but concentrate on the future.

Just as rapport building is crucial to the beginning of a mentoring relationship, a sense of adjournment is equally important at its end. Letting go is rarely comfortable, but it’s necessary if the protégé is to flourish and continue to grow out of the mentor’s shadow. In the final analysis, the upper limit of growing is “grown,” implying closure and culmination. Mark the moment by managing adjournment as a visible expression of achievement and happiness.