Can anyone be a mentor?

There is a lot of discussion around the subject of mentoring. It is something of a hot topic in education and in a business setting and there are all sorts of training courses available to teach people how to be mentors. This suggests that it is something that anyone can do, but is this the case? I guess this is a similar argument to the question of whether teachers are born or made. For me this comes down to some fundamental points around what is actually involved in mentoring. I believe that in order to be an effective mentor it is essential to be able to understand and to empathise with your mentee. You need to be able to establish effective two way communication quickly and to be able to engage in an open dialogue not simply around the subject at hand but in broad terms. You need to have a fairly sound grasp of basic psychology and the way in which the mind can work, or more importantly not work effectively, and the potential blocks to growth and development in the mentee, and perhaps most importantly you have to be able to address the relationship between you and your mentee from a position of credibility. It is crucial that your mentee has confidence in you if they are to develop confidence in themselves.

This brings me onto the next set of questions. What is the role of the mentor? There are some core answers to this, although the exact nature of the role may vary somewhat depending on situation, but in the main a mentors role is to support and encourage growth and development in the mentee allowing them to express themselves appropriately in their setting, to provide advice and guidance on the systems and structures within the mentees environment to facilitate effective integration, and to provide a sense of security and confidence appropriate to their role. In order to achieve these goals, it becomes clear that the criteria laid about above in terms of the mentors abilities become crucial. It is my belief that the majority of the criteria can be taught to the majority of people, but is this the same as saying that anyone can be a mentor?

I am not so sure. If we take the example of someone who has a wealth of experience in a given job role attempting to mentor a junior staff member. They should, by dint of their position and experience have the credibility required to be an authority figure. They should also have the specific job skills required to be an effective teacher of those skills, but they may not innately have the ability to convey those skills, they may not be an effective teacher. Training can help here, but how much is debatable. Further they may not have the necessary empathy to understand the requirements of their specific mentee, or the psychological understanding to address barriers to learning. Again these can be trained but particularly in the case of empathy there is some evidence to suggest that this is difficult to instill if it is not a core part of the makeup of an individual. There has been some controversy of late over the need to train nurses as part of their education to be empathetic towards patients. This seems to me to be a nonsense, since if one is to go into nursing for any other reason than because one is drawn to a caring profession then I would consider it unlikely that the empathetic demands of the role, which are considerable, are unlikely to ever be met, with the consequence that we are now seeing patients mis-treated and neglected on hospital wards which to me is incredible.

So perhaps some people are better able to cope with the demands of being a mentor. I would argue that yes, anyone is capable of being a mentor, but in order to achieve success for the mentee, however that success is defined there is a requirement of quality on the part of the mentor, and that is far harder to train for, and I would suggest, far harder to monitor.