Mentoring may seem like one task too many, given the current academic environment. We know that expectations for faculty have increased dramatically over the last twenty-five years. Every few years, faculty members, for example, are asked to add more administrative assignments to their already full plates. There are more cross-school activities. There are an increasing number of faculty meetings and faculty symposia where younger faculty members feel pressure to appear and participate as a litmus test for commitment to the institution. The competition to publish in the best journals has increased. Even though fewer professionals read the articles than in the past, publication constitutes a metric that is quantifiable. It is clean and antiseptic and straightforward. It is also an increasingly important criterion in promotion decisions. Faculty members often feel underappreciated and overworked regardless of how much work they actually do. Output is less relevant than appearing overworked. We pride ourselves on our feats of teaching endurance where we have taught a number of consecutive-day sessions. Like football players after a game, we return to our offices wearing evidence of our effort with pride—covered in chalk dust.

Working with a younger faculty member or spending time with students, on the other hand, lacks this same heroic thrill. Thus, the environment is not conducive to taking on the added responsibility of mentoring. In addition, senior faculty members may not be eager to mentor people who seem to possess different values and goals than they do. It’s not unusual to hear a senior professor complain that the younger faculty members were raised as Millennials or Generation Yers, meaning that they want everything now and have little to no patience.

In fact, this is a poor excuse not to mentor, especially because it’s generally myth rather than reality. What younger faculty members want more than anything else is to be reassured that there are senior faculty members who care about them, care about them deeply.

I often ask senior executives who are in their late fifties or sixties to write down the name of a mentor they had at some point in their careers, who cared more about them than about his or her own career. I tell them that if they think about it, a picture of this individual will come to mind, and you’ll recall this mentor almost demanded that you succeed. This person was there when you hit rough patches and was there to give you immediate feedback in real time. The mentor represented you in promotion and compensation decisions. Most important, you had a different experience of yourself because of how that person managed you. You felt like you could accomplish anything.

When I ask young professionals, be they academics or managers, to write down the name of a mentor who fits the above description, they look at me as if I’m speaking another language. They can’t conceive of an experience where a more senior professional would take such an interest in them. Nonetheless, younger professionals want what their mentors wanted. Unfortunately, many of them aren’t getting it because of the demands placed on the manager/mentors. Teaching, giving feedback, and spending time with subordinates continue to be the first things to fall into the “nice but not essential” category. In business, manager/mentors are more focused on hitting numbers. In academia, they are more focused on publications and classroom demands.

Senior people give up too fast when it comes to mentoring. At the end of the day, the young academics and professionals only want what their bosses received earlier in their careers. I hear senior faculty members and senior professionals wax nostalgically about the good old days when subordinates didn’t need to be coddled. But in fact, their memories have faded; they don’t remember how they grew and learned and developed. Veteran professors tend to slough off their mentoring duties in the same ways that senior executives do; the latter outsource their teaching or counseling roles to external coaches. In the academic world, that may mean not prioritizing reaching out to younger faculty members. Or it may mean assuming younger faculty will be mentored.

The worry that I have for organizations as well as universities is that strong ties are being created with no one or with the wrong professionals. In every university and company, an individual exists who is best able to mentor younger faculty members and direct reports. Whether it’s a professor or a manager, this individual is in an ideal position to mentor because of the emotional intimacy that builds as a result of the relationship over time. Yet for various reasons, many veteran professors fail to take on a mentorship role. The time commitment is what creates the biggest barrier. Time and attention to a younger faculty member doesn’t show up on the metric sheets, on the documents that are shipped to the dean’s office for the dean’s perusal. This can add to their star power as an intellectual or lead to competing offers from other universities.

One of the ways senior faculty members deal with their own guilt about not taking on this role is by making broad-brush generalities about millennials or Generation Xers. They snipe about how new workers don’t want to work hard. Or that they need constant feedback. In fact, these younger generations want just the same thing as older generations wanted and received. If I believe, as a senior faculty member, that the younger generation is lazy because of how the younger generation was raised, I can blame the younger generation’s parents rather than myself for failing to mentor.

I’ve seen time and time again where the mentoring has been lax and senior faculty members have decided that someone shouldn’t be advanced. Not only do these older professors fail to mentor, but they come close to shunning the younger faculty member. They avoid contact with the younger teacher. I’ve seen deans intervene and move younger faculty members to other departments when this avoidance occurs; in most instances, these younger faculty members flourish in different environments.

What’s discouraging about this situation is that too often once we decide someone won’t succeed, we behave in ways that sabotage younger professors, consciously or not. We don’t show up at seminars they’re leading. We may visit their classrooms yet never meet after the class to share feedback. We don’t establish less formal ways to communicate, such as meals or coffee. When younger professionals ask for some feedback on a paper, we don’t follow through and give them our insights.

Soon junior faculty members become discouraged, begin to isolate themselves, and ruminate excessively about their careers. They begin to spend more and more time alone in their offices. Senior faculty members hope that the younger professionals see the “writing on the wall” and decide to send their résumés to other universities. At the next Academy of Management meetings, the younger faculty members will spend most of their time networking and seeking faculty positions at other schools.

What Makes a Mentor

Chase Peterson, then president of the University of Utah, gave me the confidence to rise above my inner doubts. Chase and I met when he wanted to discuss my views on organizational change. He supported me in setting and seeking stretch goals. There was never a situation where I didn’t feel secure enough to try something new. John Mack, former president and CEO of Morgan Stanley, confronted me when he thought I wasn’t happy in my position at the financial services firm. He told me that looking gloomy wouldn’t help my efforts in transforming the talent management system at Morgan Stanley.

John finally told me that I should consider going back into academia if I felt I would be more aligned there with my talents. Whenever I was with Peterson or Mack, I wanted to be better. I didn’t want to let them down or disappoint. It was as if they were older brothers. I dedicated my last book to them. Chase has passed away. John is thriving after having left Morgan Stanley. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t think of one or the other. They aren’t far away. When you experience someone like Chase or John, you will be changed forever.

Chase was never in a hurry. He would ask me questions about how my semester was going and wanted to know the latest research on change management. Once or twice, he even requested my advice on how to handle delicate personnel issues.

One evening I attended a dinner party at the home of Chase and Grethe, his wife. A few students reporting on their global travels for the school would be there. He also invited senior members of the administration as well as the former president of the university David Gardner. As soon as I walked in the door, I realized that I was underdressed. All the men had suits or sport coats or ties on. I wore a V-neck sweater.

Before I could enter the main dining room to meet everyone, Chase went upstairs and put on a V-neck sweater. I could see what he was doing immediately. Nothing was ever mentioned that evening. The next day I called him and pointed out what I had observed the night before. He downplayed the event, but I was touched by his compassion, by his mentoring humanity that extended beyond the school.

John Mack took me under his wing on a number of occasions. In the first month at Morgan Stanley, after we had moved to the East Coast, John and Christy Mack (along with the company’s chairman, Richard Fisher, and his wife Emily) hosted an elegant dinner at the Blindbrook Country Club in Westchester County. Joe Perella, Richard Kauffman, Bill Reid, and I were being honored for our decisions to join Morgan Stanley at a senior level. John made sure that I was sitting next to the chairman at the head table. Since I was the nonbanker of the bunch, John wanted to send the message that I was not to be messed with. It wasn’t just that John made this gesture; it was that he made it skillfully and in a way that demonstrated his caring as a mentor.

Over the years, I’ve tried to emulate what I saw in the day-to-day actions of these two great, mentoring leaders.

And so, the questions I ask myself are: Will students want to be better leaders because of their interactions with me as one of their teachers? Will they in turn be the mentor for many others through the years?

Office Visits

Student visits to the office are integral to mentoring, yet these visits give me pause because, depending on my state of mind, I question motives. Why are they really here? Have they been told by counselors that they are close to flunking out so they need to visit each teacher? Do they have a real issue? And what is a real issue relative to a superficial query? Why am I questioning them at all and not taking them at face value?

To make the most of the thirty minutes available for the conference, I begin every meeting with the same question: “How are you doing?” I then listen. I look at the students intently and experience the silence if there is silence. I don’t try to fill up the space with just chatter unless I sense that students simply want chatter. But if I feel that’s their motivation, I ask them, “So it feels as if you’d like us to get to know one another?” But I try to get to the deeper reason for the meeting if there is one so that we can figure out what a successful meeting would look like at the end of our time together. By setting this goal up front, I’m much more likely to mentor effectively and address this goal in our conference.

I may not get to the second question if students want to talk about why they are doing well or not so well. However, I usually follow the first question with a simple query: “How can I help?” Most students don’t know how I can help other than doing what I’m doing. I’m simply a mirror, reflecting why they are experiencing a challenging situation where they are lost or overwhelmed.

The goal for me is to get students to think of alternatives for dealing with the problem. Most important, I want to adhere to the philosophy of Rollo May when he emphasized that the helping professional’s first and foremost goal is to “imagine the realities of others.” That is my mantra, and in my experience, it’s what makes mentoring work.

What I’ve realized over the years is that I want to understand students and colleagues and know their realities, and I want to communicate to them that this is my purpose. I want to know their narratives, those stories that inform how they live. This means that in one-on-one meetings I’m listening far more than I’m advising. It means that I’m asking more questions, reframing their responses, not hurrying them. I just want to be fully present.

In office meetings, we both learn about common worries related to class or our outside world, and I learn about students’ concerns about what their futures hold. I know that they are in large measure carrying the worries of a myriad of stakeholders—parents, siblings, friends. And they don’t want to let anyone down in the process. Inevitably, many of them do let them down in some form or fashion. Expectations of others as well as those they have of themselves are often unrealistic, but given their successes, they feel they can exceed all expectations. Not possible but still a goal.

First-Impression Mentoring

Mentoring can begin at first sight and can last for years. Relatively early in the hiring and socialization process, I begin to intuit whether a new hire has the ability to remain at the school long term. I’m not quite sure why I think I’m so insightful to make judgments about young faculty members. I guess I feel like I’m sort of a seer, gazing into the future and discovering that the new faculty member isn’t at the school anymore.

I don’t overtly sabotage the new colleague. I do make a decision about how much time and effort I want to expend working with the particular person. I ask myself, “Is it worth my efforts? Why don’t I work with someone who I know will make it through the system?” Only when I type these words do I realize the irony of my thinking process. Perhaps the fact that I explicitly or implicitly begin to withdraw from the person may play some role in that individual’s fate. Perhaps when other faculty members observe that I and some of my colleagues with influence are backing away from a young professor, they jump on the bandwagon and our initial reactions are confirmed—we dismiss someone early on, and that individual is dismissed later.

The same thing happens in business. Too often I see managers in organizations predict when a subordinate will implode. And I get it. In some odd way, the ability to predict the future is gratifying: “I told you he would never work out.” I’m assuming that others will recognize my ability to evaluate the quality of human potential. This illusion plays havoc in real economic terms. We hire a new faculty member and spend large amounts of money hiring and moving the scholar to Boston, only to short-circuit the process by pulling psychological and emotional support. Just when the new faculty member needs support.

Instead, I support some other young faculty member who I believe will be successful in all dimensions of academic life. Many of my colleagues do the same thing and withdraw support the fastest from those who are struggling. We may create the illusion that we are helping or interested in their careers, but it is largely a fairly bogus effort. It is what I call deeply shallow conversation. Act intimate and interested but only pretend. Most everyone knows it’s a charade. But we’ve had enough practice to understand just how much eye contact, voice intonation, and spatial distancing are necessary to communicate that you can’t be saved but we will be cordial and not shun you.

If you are a star from day one, we all trip over ourselves to include you. We figure out ways to take some credit in the individual’s good luck, the positive outcomes. This insight relates to my core pattern of spending too much time in either/or thinking. The colleague is either making it or not. Black and white. Star or goat.

But regardless of patterns, many professors put on an act. We pretend empathy and some regret that it didn’t work out. But we quickly move onto another topic like whether we will attend graduation or where we might vacation during the summer. It’s comforting to conclude our verbal jam session by ending on a positive note. It feels better all around.

Managing Up: How to Impress

Three years ago, a senior colleague came into my office to ask me a question about one of the junior faculty members. He was worried that the new hire was disingenuous on occasion. John said, “There are times I’m with Mary that I feel like I’m being managed. It’s like she tells me exactly what she thinks I want to hear. She has the uncanny ability to know what I’m going to say or want to hear before I say it. I find it off-putting. Every couple of weeks she will find a way to compliment me about how wise I am or how I perform magic in the classroom. It’s just not necessary. Tom, at the end of the day we give tenure to those that we want to hang out with, who we can be together with without feeling managed or manipulated. What’s your experience of this person?”

John seems taken aback by my reply. I asked him if he would like just a bit of historical feedback related to himself and his perceived style. When he assented, I said, “John, when you were new here I felt the same way about you as you feel now about Mary. But I didn’t have the courage to say it then. As I think about my own career journey through academia I think I honed the art of figuring out what I sensed senior faculty wanted to hear. I could smell it. And I responded accordingly. So I was a pro at it. In fact, I don’t think you were as good at it as I was. You should have practiced more.”

My observation is that everyone manages up to serve his or her needs. Everyone. I don’t think people even know they are doing it because it has become so natural. Whether it was learned as an infant and practiced for a lifetime, I have no way of knowing. But I sense that in relatively flat professional service organizations like universities, while the hierarchy has few levels, it is highly political. It matters how the senior faculty see you. It matters what people say about you behind closed doors, in other hallways, in senior faculty meeting discussions.

I remember one assistant professor whom I mentioned early in the book. He couldn’t make a comment without referring to three other senior faculty members by whom he had been influenced. Whether we were in a large school faculty meeting with two hundred professors or within the department confines with twenty faculty members, I could predict he would acknowledge someone who had been a big help in mentoring him. It felt so obsequious in word and deed. I asked him to come visit my office at his convenience.

I have great affection for this faculty member, and that helped facilitate our conversation. Fundamentals were in place for me to be direct and share my perception of a particular behavior that I thought wasn’t serving him. When I gave him three examples, he tried to explain each one away. I remarked on his defensiveness. He said, “But I don’t ever want to be seen as someone who wants all the credit.” I replied, “Why do you seem defensive, like you have to defend yourself?” He said, “Because I’m embarrassed. When you point this behavior out, I see it, I see myself doing it, thinking I am being mature, but I’m just trying to impress others by showing how much I know and how many faculty with whom I’ve worked. I feel like crawling in a hole.” I said, “You are already in a hole. How can I help you get out?” He sat quietly. I came over around my desk and began to beat him up in a playful way. I told him that I was the only professor on campus who was perfect. We laughed together.

In the next faculty meeting, he caught himself twice getting ready to list off the names of faculty members with whom he had discussed his research. Each time he looked over at me he saw that I had a wide smile on my face. He managed to say what he wanted to say without referencing anyone, and after the meeting I teased him. We then went our separate ways. My belief in having covenantal relationships—that of mentor and mentee—played itself out in this scene with a positive outcome. The interaction strengthened our relationship.

My junior colleague knew I would not hold back because of the mentoring “rules” we had established in our relationship. At the same time, the relationship is a two-way street, and I urged him to visit and observe my classes so he could give me constructive ideas to enhance my classroom approach. He had very good insights. I was impressed by his insights. I followed through on what he advised me to do and it worked. The relationship became even closer. I felt more commitment to tending the relationship.