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Finito World
There is a peculiar frustration in trying to help someone who doesn’t seem to want to be helped. You arrange the meeting, offer the advice, perhaps even open a door or two, and find yourself confronted by monosyllables, missed appointments or an expression of polite indifference. The mentor begins to wonder whether the whole enterprise is worth the trouble. But perhaps the first mistake is to regard mentoring as an enterprise at all.
We tend to imagine mentoring as a straightforward transaction: one person possesses experience, another lacks it, and the former passes something valuable to the latter. The difficulty with this picture is that human beings are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They have their own anxieties, prejudices, ambitions and private histories. The advice which seems obvious to one person may be almost impossible for another to receive.
The evidence suggests that the relationship itself matters at least as much as the wisdom being imparted. A 2018 meta-analysis of research into natural mentoring, examining eight studies involving 7,363 young people, found a statistically significant association between the quality of the mentoring relationship and positive outcomes. The effect was modest, but the implication is important: simply providing someone with a mentor is not the same as establishing a relationship which helps them.
The first question, then, is whether the mentee is genuinely disengaged, or merely disengaged in a way the mentor doesn’t recognise. A young person who appears uninterested may be frightened of exposing their ignorance. Someone who fails to follow up on an introduction may be struggling with confidence. A mentee who rejects perfectly sensible advice may be attempting, however clumsily, to establish independence. None of these possibilities excuses discourtesy, but each suggests a different response. There is also the uncomfortable possibility that the mentor is the problem.
Successful people can become rather attached to the wisdom of their own experience. Having discovered a route through life, they are inclined to recommend it to others. Yet the world which produced their success may no longer exist. The graduate entering employment today faces an entirely different landscape from someone who began their career twenty or thirty years ago. What sounds like encouragement to the mentor may sound like an irrelevant lecture to the mentee.
David Clutterbuck, one of Britain’s leading authorities on mentoring, has written extensively about the responsibilities of both parties. His description of mentoring as a “professional friendship” is particularly useful, since friendship implies mutual respect rather than a simple hierarchy of knowledge. He also argues that mentees must take responsibility for their own learning, prepare for meetings and be willing to challenge their mentors’ assumptions. Mentoring, in other words, is neither a lecture nor a free consultancy service.
This raises a practical question: how long should a mentor persevere? One useful approach is to make the relationship smaller. Instead of grand conversations about five-year plans, propose something achievable: a revised CV, an application, a conversation with someone in an interesting profession. Small commitments have the advantage of being measurable. They also create opportunities for success, which can be particularly important for someone whose previous experiences have encouraged them to expect failure.
There are limits, however, to what even the most conscientious mentor can achieve. A major 2011 review by David DuBois and colleagues, examining 73 evaluations of youth mentoring programmes, found that mentoring could improve behavioural, social, emotional and academic outcomes. Yet the benefits were not automatic. An earlier review by DuBois and colleagues found that average benefits were relatively small and warned that poorly implemented programmes could sometimes have adverse effects on vulnerable young people. Good intentions, evidently, are not enough.
This is worth remembering when a relationship appears to be going nowhere. The mentor may be tempted to redouble their efforts, offering more advice, arranging more meetings and making increasingly elaborate interventions. But this can create an unfortunate imbalance, in which the mentor becomes more invested in the mentee’s future than the mentee themselves. At some point, encouragement risks becoming pressure, and generosity a form of unwanted supervision.
Nevertheless, there is an equal danger in giving up too quickly. Trust is not always immediate, particularly where differences of age, class or experience are considerable. A person who seems resistant in October may remember a conversation in March. We cannot always know which words have taken root, or whether an apparently unsuccessful meeting has nevertheless altered someone’s understanding of what might be possible.
Perhaps the answer lies in establishing expectations early, reviewing them honestly and accepting that not every mentoring relationship will flourish. Repeated cancellations or a complete unwillingness to take modest steps may indicate that the arrangement should end, though preferably without recrimination. A mentor can withdraw while making it clear that the door remains open should circumstances change.
The supposedly unmentorable mentee may, in the end, be asking something rather difficult of the mentor: to care about another person’s progress without becoming possessive about it. We can illuminate possibilities, offer introductions and sometimes remove obstacles. What we cannot do is live another person’s life for them. And knowing the difference may be among the most valuable lessons mentoring has to offer.
