(Photo by iStock/pixelfit)
Like many doctoral students, Ting Zhang had a graduate school experience that was largely shaped by the mentorship she received. Zhang credits her advisors with helping her feel like an equal partner—not only a junior colleague seeking career guidance, but also someone who could provide learning opportunities, even for senior scholars. As Zhang went on to conduct research across industries and professions, she still mulled over mentorship, struck by the vastly different meanings ascribed to it. In talking to managers, Zhang discovered that some saw mentorship as a time-consuming obligation—a requirement imposed by HR departments—while others relished the prospect of learning from those below them in their social hierarchy.
Zhang, now a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, has published a new paper with Dan J. Wang, a professor of business at Columbia Business School, and Adam D. Galinsky, a professor of leadership and ethics and vice dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Columbia Business School, that investigates how mentors approach mentorship and how their engagement affects the learning and career outcomes of mentees.
“Why is it that some people go into mentorship seeing a valuable learning opportunity that could have cascading consequences for how mentees experience the relationship, whereas others make little time for the relationship and aren’t nearly as engaged?” Zhang asks. “What we realized is that people have directionality when it comes to who they can learn from. People want to learn, but not everyone feels like they can learn from their mentees.”
Parents of young children might be familiar with the term growth mindset, which was coined by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck to describe the outlook of learners who believe they can change and grow over time. Focusing on improvement rather than outcomes, growth mindset includes a component of directionality. Building on Dweck’s work, the researchers designed experiments to measure how individuals’ learning direction relates to their effectiveness as mentors.
In three correlational studies, the researchers tested the link between mentors’ downward learning direction, or openness to learning from those who sit below them in the organizational hierarchy, and their engagement with mentees. Their findings demonstrate that “how mentors view the direction of their own learning impacts how effectively they can expand the learning of others.” For most people, looking downward for learning isn’t intuitive or reflexive, but the researchers observed that those who viewed mentoring interactions as opportunities, and not as a burden, produced mentees with better learning outcomes. A fourth and final experiment manipulated learning directions to confirm causality: A downward learning orientation increased mentor engagement, which improved mentee outcomes.
“This research affirms something of a conundrum for organizations: Hierarchy reflects who has power but not necessarily who has knowledge and expertise,” says Joe Magee, a professor of management and organizations at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Developing skills in a certain domain does not necessarily translate into mentorship skills, and top performers are not necessarily the best advisors.
In the first study, the researchers surveyed some 500 professionals to determine whether learning orientation predicted one’s degree of engagement as a mentor. The second study looked for the mechanism underlying the link between a downward learning orientation and a high degree of engagement as a mentor. When professionals saw mentorship not as an obligation but as an opportunity to gain relevant knowledge and skills from mentees, they dedicated more time and energy to the relationship.
The third study surveyed mentors at a computer-science coding boot camp that tracked mentee performance over time. In mock interviews, the researchers evaluated participants and used a scale to ask, “How much do you think you can learn from someone above you, lateral to you, and below you?” Putting the answers into a model, the researchers established a strong correlation between a downward learning direction and better mentee outcomes. They also found that learning orientation was malleable. Prompting participants to recognize instances of having learned “from below” helped them see mentoring as a two-way street, a relationship from which they could possibly benefit.
“Just as it can be difficult during a performance review for a supervisor to realize they should listen, as much as talk, to their employee, it can be challenging for mentors to realize they have much to learn from their mentees,” Magee says. “Zhang and colleagues show us that when mentors approach the mentoring relationship with the objective of learning as much from their mentee as their mentee from them, both parties stand to benefit, and the relationship is doubly rewarding.”
Ting Zhang, Dan J. Wang, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below,” Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.