You know more than you think you know.
If you have been at your job, your school, or just walking around human for while, you know some things. You may have come to that knowledge through hard-won experience, even failure. Someone at your organization or in your community does not yet know what you know, and may benefit from that insight.
As a mentor, this is one way you can offer great benefit to your mentee: by showing them that otherwise secret knowledge. You can illuminate what to you seems easy and obvious because you have done this before. You have a chance to pass on what led to your success or what you learned from failure, what Naval Academy Midshipmen call “the gouge.”
You can pull back the curtain, and show a mentee the backstage world of experts.
Jack did this for his mentees when he showed them how be prepared for public speaking engagements. He showed mentees his legal pads and how he practiced his remarks.
Doug offered this to Curtis around home maintenance and simple family life. The mentor modeled how to live one version of adult and family life that his mentee might not have observed elsewhere.
Jane brought Brent into the world of briefing policymakers, preparing her mentee and instilling in him a confidence that he might not have earned elsewhere. She showed him how to operate in those otherwise closed environments.
In all of these cases, otherwise mysterious knowledge was something that great mentors made available to mentees with less time—and less pain—than it likely took the mentors to acquire that knowledge in the first place.
How to mentors do this?
First, they know what they know. Great mentors reflect and understand their own paths to success and moments of failure. They also reflect about how to convey that knowledge in clear principles. The late early childhood educator and scholar of early childhood education, Ruby Takanishi, called this being an “articulate practitioner,” or someone who is skilled at both their trade and can talk about it in a clear way with the less experienced1.
Second, mentors focus on a learning task that is of some importance to the mentee. Sam was able to have an impact on Brian because wrestling mattered to Brian at that point in his life. He and Brian further forged a deeper connection beyond the mat at a key moment of need for the mentee. Jack was able to connect with Andi only when she was mature enough to take the next step in her career. The broader life lessons came through tasks that mattered to those mentees at that time.
Third, great mentors appreciate what mentees already know. Like the pilot I met who used his trainee pilot’s past experience and knowledge to teach him to fly with a new guidance system. Malcolm Knowles classic adult learning theory2 from the 1970s (known as andragogy) stresses that in teaching adults—including some high school and many college-aged mentees—must include building on their existing knowledge and experience and their desire to address specific problems. The mentor may know more about your shared area of work, but the mentee is not an empty whiteboard.
Fourth, mentors give mentees a chance to practice what they have been shown. Mentees need to struggle. They may even need to fail. Jason let Melissa lead meetings and deliver budget information to the senior athletic staff mostly without his intervention. He offered private counsel, wise feedback. He offered preparation for a challenging environment and then the opportunity to be challenged in that environment, much like what Jane offered to Brent. But ultimately, these mentors found a chance for their mentee to attempt what mentors had long ago learned to do.
Finally, mentees need wise feedback. They need to chance to reflect on whether what they attempted to do was effective. Not just that they need to get better, but ideas on improvement imbued with the belief that they can meet high expectations. Not whether they did it just the way the mentor would have or used to, but whether they know the principles well enough to apply them in a new setting. Jack understood this well; he let his mentees take charge of the office’s new social media tools, but also had them write out plans as he would have done earlier in his career, and offered them challenging, supportive feedback along the way.
A great mentor teaches the principles of their craft, but also understands what matters to their mentee and what they already know. They see that a mentee might need to apply those principles in different ways to a new time and place.
Still, mentors know things. One way they can support mentees is to pull back the curtain and show them the hidden, backstage area of expertise.
Takanishi, R. (1981). Early Childhood Education and Research: The Changing Relationship. Theory Into Practice, 20(2), 86–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/147629
Knowles, M. S., Holton III, E. F., & Swanson, R. A. (2014). The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development. Routledge.