Power in Mentoring Relationships

The last few days have left me nostalgic and sentimental. I have been in conversations with Thrive Mentees and Mentors globally, while we work towards deciding the Thrive Mentor and Mentee of the year. There were so many undercurrents to our conversations, but the one that left me with much thought and contemplation is “power”. 

One of my earliest mentors, someone I realize I haven’t given much credit to, was where I encountered ‘power’ in a mentoring relationship. 

We didn’t start out in a structured mentoring program. In fact, he detested me from Day one. A seasoned professional, he didn’t have much time on his hands to train me. I for one was aghast that another would not see the merit of me. In the absence of a defined work structure, and because I was in fact a new trainee, I scoured the environment for projects I could take up. He said no to each of them and then finally put me on a project that I hated. I was determined to put my best foot forward. This was the first time that we had interacted beyond a few cursory seconds. 

The project didn’t go well, but he was impressed with my project debrief and report. Possibly the report didn’t say anything that he didn’t already know, but how I reported it, with substantiating case studies, data and analysis was what went down well with him. 

He walked over to my desk on a Monday morning and asked “Shivangi, I think we owe each other a chat. Let’s meet at 4pm today?” I was giddy with excitement. I reread my report, assuming that this was what our chat would be about. At 3.30pm his office called to check if I had time and that he would like to meet me earlier than planned. Wow. 

As I walked to his office, carrying prints of my report, my laptop, a notebook and a pen, I thought that this was it. This was my moment. I was finally going to get noticed. He opened the door to his office to walk me in and we settled on the coffee table. He apologized for advancing the meeting at short notice and checked if the new time was inconvenient.

“No. Of course not. I am glad to be here." 

I am sure I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice. After we did away with the pleasantries, he asked me “tell me which part of the project did you enjoy the most”.

That question was the beginning of a long working relationship with him. It wasn’t as much about the project, as it was about me. We talked for almost 3 hours. As I spoke I understood where I had been misjudging this person and I also told him that I felt rather ignored by him and that I could do quite a lot for the function. To which he said “I am sure of that, I just didn’t know where I could put you to use, now I know.” And began my tryst with organisation design and development and remains so till date, only much more intricate now. 

I worked in that function for a couple of year, but soon he changed roles. What began as a boss subordinate relationship, turned into a mentor mentee one after I left that organization. 

When I reflect back on that relationship – what stand out for me is the way I was ‘being’ rather than what he was ‘doing’…

Divestment of power: How to empower each other and especially the mentee by removing power connotations from active conversation? 

We were discussing how best to onboard employees and get them their resources- workstation, laptop, mobile phone and the works within a week of joining. Our new joinee satisfaction levels were low, and most of us thought that if we handed over the MacBook on Day One, they would be far more engaged in the company. After going back n forth quite a bit, I had quite a guttural reaction. I told him that the only reason why people flock to all these is that there is no real engagement with the team. Instead of the MacBook if you got them to shadow their HoDs or bosses for a week, that would engage them far more than a Mac. All they needed was a pen and a notebook. And 20 minutes at the end of the day with the manager. 

He looked at me thoughtfully and asked “for how many days have you been fretting about this now?”

“Almost a week. But I assumed that you would know better”. 

“If I were to know better on everything, I don't see the rationale of hiring bright young minds like yourself.”

And quite simply just like that, I realised that the power connotation was more in my head than in the relationship. Our relationship evolved that way. As a matter of practice he would want me to challenge his thought process and ask me to share what I was thinking of but not saying. If I agreed to something, he would say what are your reasons for agreeing. If I said no to something, we went back n forth till one of us relented or the other understood the context. 

A mentoring relationship starts with an implicit power context. The mentor, who usually brings more work and life experience, is assumed to have the upper hand. Mentors may also find themselves in the situation that a mentee is seeking lots of advice, and it might seem easy to be the problem solver. They help mentees critically think about goals, challenge their decisions or their avoidance of a decision. So it leads one or both to think that this “influence” that a mentor has over the mentee is “power”. It is not. It is just influence. What the naked eye sees as power, is actually consultative in nature. 

When there is the possibility of power in a mentoring relationship, even a notional possibility, there is a big chance that the mentor and mentee will resist connecting with each other. The mentor will “need” to feel respected and the mentee will not have it in them to respect without cause or simply because of experience. It is time to contest what our minds perceive to be “power” and look deeper into the authenticity of the mentoring relationship. 

I believe, in a successful mentoring relationship the mentor evolves as much as the mentee, if not more. There is constant role modelling happening there and both rely on each other for psychosocial support. Mentoring relationships are reciprocal in nature (I bet you haven’t heard a lot on this before!), and that is why power is a notional concept. Most people allude to it, but if you examine the circumstances closely, it is at best an illusion, which has never been enforced. 

As long as there are power undercurrents to a mentoring relationship, there is an unnatural dependency of the mentee on the mentor. The mentor doesn’t have your correct answers, only ask the right questions to ensure that the correct answers come to the fore front.