An Insight Into Mentoring

There is ample research out there, books, and plenty of nurse leaders who advocate for mentoring. There seems to be a universal cry that more mentoring is needed. The predominant discussions revolve around our new nurses who need mentoring, our experienced nurses who think they don’t, and there is a whole middle group rarely talked about.

If you ask many leaders about mentors, most will say they have one. And if you ask many newer nurses if they have one, most will not. There are the exceptions, but in my discussions with both ends of this continuum, this has been the rule. Challenging sometimes for many mentees is a belief that the mentor is going to make you successful like they were successful. This is an admirable goal. I would like you to pause though if you are a mentor; I would like to share an observation on mentoring. The observation was instigated by some articles I recently read which impacts how nurses provide care.

End of life care can be a beautiful and challenging time for nurses. In a recent article posted on Fox News, “When to give up: Treatment or comfort for late-stage cancer?”, the family of Joe Clark talked about the battle they faced when this young man was diagnosed with a terminal cancer at a young age. In another article, a dying patient wanted to visit the ocean and stop her treatments and enjoy life. In both, they came to a decision to go down a path they chose, and probably not the path their health leaders would have chosen.

As healthcare professionals, sometimes giving up is not in our nature. And if there is a chance to help save someone, we take it.

But what if the patient doesn’t want to follow our recommendation?

In mentoring, we have some of the same responsibilities and restraints in our leadership that we should or do enact with our patients. Mentoring someone means you provide them with options, choices of actions they can choose to help them improve. You want them to succeed and you have knowledge and experience to help them. So you provide that leadership.

In the mentoring relationship though, you should have some in-depth knowledge on what the mentee wants in life. You need to ask the hard questions on what is important to them professionally and personally. The decision on options should consider how each course of action will impact their priorities. The actions should not be to make this mentee a replica of you the mentor, but to make them the best they can be as a professional. And that means you have to consider what’s important to them. This is made difficult if their priorities are slightly too drastically different than yours.

In those times where your goals for future success are not in alignment with your mentee, do you have the leadership confidence to give them courses of actions to meet their goals? This challenge is what has complicated mentoring relationships where the mentor does not understand that the valuable focus of the relationship is on the mentee. Simple arrogance would tell us mentors that our mentee obviously wants to be like me. But do they?

If you are in a mentoring relationship, I want to give you 5 questions you need to ask yourself that will help you guide the relationship you have with your mentee:

1. What does your mentee want? Sounds basic but this one questions will set the future discussions. Many times your mentee may not know, so it will be a wonderful journey as you two discover this together. Consider their personality, their goals for their professional life, the importance of their personal desires, and how balance can be attained.
2. What is your paradigm of success? How do you as a leader and mentor define success can impact how you approach your mentee. A mentor’s goal is to better the mentee, to help them achieve their goals. It is not to create the “mini me” so many try to do. Your determination for defining success will drive how you direct your actions with your mentee. Ensure you don’t put your definition of success onto them.
3. How do you balance goals if they are incongruent? If you have a mentee whose goals are so polar opposite of yours, then as the mentor, your challenge is to provide them options and to assist them in achieving their goals. Your thoughts and guidance needs to provide them support to their goals, but you can also provide options from your experience and what worked for you. Challenging thoughts and differing options allows dialogue and intelligent discussion before decision.
4. Can you challenge their goals and still be honest to yourself and them? You are still you so you need to provide options for discussion and learning that you can support. There is great growth when you consider diversity of thought and as a mentor you need to do that for your mentee. I chose my mentor for my doctoral dissertation based partially on the fact he was opposite of me in many ways. His way of thinking, how he tackled work and research, and his experiences provided me insight and learning in ways I could only learn from someone who thought like him. I became better for it.
5. Can you still maintain a mentor relationship? There are times that if the chasm is too great, you are better to end the relationship. This decision should be obvious to both of you. It sets a good introduction to have that discussion at the beginning of the relationship. If you or the mentee feel it is not working, both should be professional to admit and to end the relationship. It is not failure, it is mature and professional.

As in end of life care where our actions as nurses should be directed by the patient, a mentorship relationship should be directed by the mentee. Most challenging for leaders is dealing with a mentee whose goals are different than ours. Your goal then is to be the best mentor possible and to help your mentee reach their goals so they can fulfill their potential in their professional life.

Leading with you.

Dean

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