Nonprofit Mentoring

It was revealed this week that since 2012, the Harvard men’s soccer team has been keeping a shared “database” ranking Harvard’s female athletes on looks, sexual appeal and suspected sexual preferences.  The University’s response to this revelation—that the team will forfeit the rest of the season and participation in the Ivy League and NCAA competitions—prompted the male cross country team to out themselves:  they, too, have kept a similar database and thought it better to come clean rather than wait for the university to find out on its own.

Yes, you can imagine some of the thoughts that this has prompted for me, and so many others.  First, there is the time check:  are we really almost in 2017?  Then, there is the quality check:  these, after all, are men at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, where, theoretically, the brightest (which has never been a synonym of enlightened) of students attend.  If these men are still thinking and acting like Neanderthals, what are the rest of their sex thinking?  And, lastly, there is the reality check:  we really haven’t made that much progress, have we?

But, that isn’t where my mind actually went, at least not immediately.  Rather, it was to the question of who is mentoring these boys.  (And, yes, I use boys intentionally, as boys hang out in locker rooms and laugh at reeking lockers, passing wind and humping benches; men are above such puerile amusement).   After all, parents get first crack, and we hope we build a strong foundation; but then life exposes everyone to other things, other influences, and, yes, other teachers and mentors.  Until my son played college football, I was under the impression that collegiate coaches were supposed to be mentors to these young men.  Was I ever wrong!  Some were just interested in doing whatever was necessary to win games and championships. Others wanted to win games and be pals.  Fortunately, there were those who did see their jobs as teaching these young men more than just about football and how to win.  And there were those upperclassmen who wanted to be one of the boys in the locker room—and were.  And those – whether they knew it or not or wanted it or not –who were mentors to guys in the classes that came after them.  Fortunately, some of the underclassmen found the mentors early on.

Stories abound of people who credit a share of their success and comfort with who they are as a professional, to one or more mentors.  According to an Accountemps’ study, 86% of executives believe that a mentor is key to career success, despite the fact that only about a quarter of them actually had a mentor.  Research abounds showing that mentors help get promotions and better compensation, help with a faster acclimation to new situations and the avoidance of embarrassing (and, potentially, costly) missteps.   And, according to The National Mentoring Partnership, 130% of young adults at risk of “falling off track” (say, like some male athletes at Harvard, for example?) are more likely to end up in positions of leadership if they have a mentor.

So, why do we see so little, formal mentoring happening in the nonprofit sector?  I’d actually been thinking about this for a while.  It all started when a young woman was set up to fail by a lazy board of directors.  The board, not willing to do the admittedly hard work that finding a new executive director takes, promoted from within a person who was not yet qualified and ready to be an executive director—and they left her to her own devices.  Which, sadly, just aren’t there.  Not being totally without resources, she identified several people as her “mentors.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t qualify those mentors; she merely looked for people who looked like her in positions to which she aspired.  She doesn’t know, for example, that one of the people she is using as her mentor was embroiled in a state-level investigation for her questionable usage of state dollars.   Nor does she know that this same person has been doing some funky things with the finances of the organization she runs, while also clearly running the board.  Nor does she know that this person’s “positive” aura extends, well, very little.  In other words, this “mentor” is as bad a teacher as the Harvard soccer players who have handed down the “database” as if it were a prized possession.

A few years ago, the Intelligence Group, a marketing and research company, found that 72% of millennials want to be their own bosses, but, if they have to work for a boss, 79% want that boss to be more coach and mentor than “boss.”  And someone who understands the difference between mentor and micromanaging.  While I can easily argue that good bosses should be, in addition to other things, coaches and mentors, there is greater value in having a mentor who is independent, who is not in the mentee’s line of command and with whom the mentee can be 150% honest, without fear of reprisals.  And while that mentor certainly can self-select, and not infrequently does, that isn’t always the best approach.  Nor is it wise, as the example above makes clear, to leave the selection of the mentor to the very person seeking the experienced voice.

Given how important the right mentor can be to someone early in her/his career—and beyond—the selection of such should not be left up to chance.