We hear a lot about mentorship in the context of middle managers who aspire to be leaders. You can read more about Mentoring as an EDUCAUSE Special Topic. I thought this is a great time to talk about someone that I consider as my mentor – John Meerts, who was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Wesleyan University until he retired on June 30th this year. John was the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan from 1996 till 2006, when he became the VP for Finance and Administration. I reported to him from 1996-2009 before moving on.

No matter at what stage of your professional career you are, you always should aspire to be better and an important aspect of that is to have someone that you look up to for advice or from who you learn a few things. To me this loosely defines mentorship.

I am skeptical that mentorship or how to be a good mentee can be taught in a classroom. I would have been miserable if, as a part of leadership development, I was asked to take a course on this. I have a history of being a terrible student in classes in that I get restless because of the pace at which instruction takes place (no wonder I love the MOOCs). I was almost kicked out of an Oracle class because I was being very disruptive and was reading my email all the time. The fact that I answered all the questions didn’t matter, of course!

I think mentor-mentee interaction is all about mutual trust and relationship building. I also feel that it is a slow, spontaneous and lengthy process. Unfortunately, it is also not a well defined recipe, where, on a weekly basis, mentor and mentee sit down to talk about “OK, I have this issue that I would like your views on” or “Mentee, I observed you during the meetings this week, and I have a few things to discuss with you”…

I developed a respect for John at the get go because of his unwavering views on delivering excellent customer service. A mentee should develop such respect first in order for the remainder of things to follow. John also had many other characteristics that I found interesting and fascinating. He was always the first one to test and report issues on anything new that we rolled out. He simply had a knack for it. A true techie that I was, I initially answered him “Well, it works for me”, implying that there is something that he was doing wrong. But he would point out gently that the fact that it worked for us techies didn’t mean much if it didn’t work for the end users. In small but simple ways you start putting together how we are running an organization where we absolutely need to look out for our end users and not just us!!!

John also expected nothing but the best from all staff which required tough love from the supervisors. He brought to Wesleyan a method for performance review that I have fully bought into and have tried to implement it here at Wellesley. The basic premise is that we absolutely need to praise the staff for all the good things that they do, but we should also help identify specific areas where they can improve upon and pave a path for improving.

I learned so many such things just by just observing and absorbing. I am therefore biased in feeling that mentor-mentee relationship is spontaneous and can work best when the two are proximal. I am a skeptic when it comes to long distance mentoring, though, it is quite possible for it to work for some.

It is also the case that whereas I picked up a lot of good things from John which has greatly benefited me in my career, we did not always agree on everything. This is very important in developing a strong relationship in that both the parties have to accept that a mentee needs to agree with everything a mentor does or says.

Whereas we had so many common things to discuss, we also had so many non-overlapping interests that we used to discuss. He loved playing music and had a band. Despite living in this country for 38 years, I have absolutely no knowledge or interest in western music, zilch! He loved riding his motorcycle and I was scared of them. He had a little scheme on a topic from which I learned a lot. It goes like this – buy a truck powerful enough to pull an RV. But then buy an RV that is too big for the truck, so you sell the truck and get a bigger truck!

Anyways, I just wanted to thank John for his excellent mentorship which has benefited me tremendously. For that I owe him a lot. And as he is fully aware, I am a Hindu who believes in reincarnation (and the rules about it) and because I owe him in this birth, I will be born as perhaps a dog in his household in my next birth. Or may be as his motorbike, or an RV!!!