When to Mentor and When to Say No

Just as LinkedIn was unveiling its research on women and mentoring, a really interesting discussion about mentoring appeared on Harvard Business Review, spurred by a piece by Whitney Johnson. She's a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton Christensen's investment firm.

Johnson describes her experience, in which she is constantly asked to become a mentor to someone, and doesn't have a good way to figure out who's a great candidate to become a mentee and who's just going to irritate her and suck up her time. She turned to frequent collaborator Bob Moesta, who is the managing partner of The Re-Wired Group, a Detroit incubator. The two of them turned the to-mentor-or-not-to dilemma into an equation. An actual equation. At first, the very idea of this made my skin crawl. But then it seemed kind of brilliant. Here's what they came up with (and I apologize for not being able to figure out a more graphical, intuitive way to represent this in WordPress):

• The drive of the mentee, multiplied by
• the distance they need to cover to get to where they need to be professionally

• the gap between the mentor and mentee's experience multiplied by
• the distance between the mentor's experience and the mentee multiplied by
• the amount of work the relationship will demand of the mentor.

• Would-be mentors should give homework, right up front. The potential mentor has to know how much drive the would-be mentee has. Some people have no trouble getting up the courage to ask for a mentoring relationship, but they've got no follow-through. So before committing to a mentoring relationship, Johnson suggests giving the mentee a task, and seeing how well they do at it. You need to know they're going to put work into this, too.
• It takes less work to mentor a more junior person. This may seem counterintuitive, because the more junior someone is, the further they probably have to travel. But a mentor has lots to teach someone 10 years behind them. Any problem the mentee runs into has probably been faced by the mentor dozens of times. On the other hand, someone only two years behind you is probably going to be more of a challenge. You're going to think harder about what they're facing, because you've probably only recently figured it out yourself.
• Your experience should overlap with that of your mentee. By a lot. If the mentee's request is not in your sweet spot, it's going to take you a lot more work to teach them.

Meanwhile, my post on LinkedIn's mentoring research got a very strong reaction, and I've been getting lots of emails from people in mentoring organizations who'd like to match mentors and mentees. Keep them coming! I'll do a follow-up post with a list of resources for those who are interested.

How do you choose a mentor or a mentee? Are Johnson's guidelines familiar?

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