This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm by Dawn Poulos and is filed under On-demand learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Much of the practical, on-demand learning that people absorb during their careers comes from individuals who’ve developed mentoring relationships with us. They offer advice, they have useful contacts that they share access to, they help us with our decision-making process when we have tough choices to make.
But as Dr. David Perlmutter notes in a recent article on mentoring relationships in academia, there’s also an art to being a good protégé. In addition to respecting appropriate boundaries and being willing to hear honest criticism, an important factor is expectation management:
… A bedrock quality of a good protégé is being able to accept imperfection in our mentors as much as we hope they will forgive our peccadilloes. You can get good advice from people who may not possess all, or even most, of the qualities of the perfect mentor.
A doctoral student I know once lamented that a senior professor in her department, while offering astute advice about research methods, was a cold fish when it came to personal encouragement. I suggested that she listen carefully to what he had to say about content analysis but find somebody else to be her confidant.
Alternately, there was the case of the “grand old man” who was a true father confessor to his doctoral students, the perfect person with whom they could share their worries and leave feeling valued and respected. The problem was that he was too positive in his critiques: Somehow, all of the papers he read were “terrific.” …
It’s important to be realistic in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of those who’ve achieved what we’d like to achieve, just as it is to evaluate our own, and listen patiently when others help us in the task of seeing ourselves for who we are.
It’s well known, in web design and many other fields, that people make many decisions by muddling. If you stop to think about it, that’s probably true of many of your recent decisions, and it’s probably true of most of your mentor’s life decisions. We don’t have time, most of the time, to weigh every option, commission a study, or get a report from a panel.
We hope our knowledge and experience to date have prepared us to adequately deal with challenges as they come up. Over time, we see patterns in the outcomes, try to learn from them, and often find places where things we were taught or believed in earnest turned out not to work very well.
To the extent that a mentor can help leapfrog some of that muddling by sharing the results of their applied decisions, they don’t need to be remotely perfect in order to save us a lot of grief.
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