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By Wendy Luke and Amanda Kodek This article was published in Museum, March/April issue of 2008.
“A mentor may not be able to change your essence, but he or she can be essential in assuring you that help is there when you slip so that you don’t fall too far, and reminding you to cook ideas correctly when you fear that you may have lost the recipe,” Gross says.
Mentoring is a sustained relationship between two professionals, ideally of mutual benefit. With roots dating back to Homer’s Odyssey (Ulysses trusted the care of his son to Mentor, a guiding, trusted friend), the mentoring partnership surpasses other career development opportunities such as workshops and conferences with its promise of ongoing, one-on-one support. It is perhaps the best way to transfer skills from a more experienced colleague to a newcomer, ensuring the continued application and development of this knowledge.
While formal mentoring programs are prominent in the for-profit world, they are not as prevalent in museums. In preparing for our “Mentoring Matters: Today’s Investment in Tomorrow’s Leaders” session at the 2007 AAM Annual Meeting, we spoke to 75 museum professionals about this issue—from those just entering the field to midcareer professionals to directors at large and small institutions. They repeatedly stated that the main obstacles to mentoring programs lie in institutions’ typically small staffs, whose priorities are exhibitions, programs and public education and whose demanding schedules and tight budgets often preclude supporting such programs. In addition, mentoring is generally regarded as an individual undertaking—not an institutional one—and supervision, collegiality and on-the-job training are often incorrectly perceived as mentoring relationships.
On the flip side, the deficiency also owes to those in need of a mentor’s assistance. Young professionals who may want a mentor have no idea how to find one—much less how to then ask someone to fulfill this role. Others fear that attempting to establish this relationship will make them appear inexperienced, leaving them vulnerable in a competitive field. Yet these same professionals find themselves in meetings seated across from colleagues 20 to 30 years their senior without the confidence and know-how to feel they have something to contribute. Time and again we heard—and believe—that mentoring is an essential and currently missing piece of the puzzle.
While certain mentoring programs do exist in museums, informally or otherwise, they are not widespread enough to fully meet the field’s needs. This is especially true in the face of the much-discussed and anticipated leadership gap that the entire nonprofit community faces in the next five years. As Selma Holo, director of the International Museum Institute at the University of Southern California, warns, “If the present successful directors and chief curators in our museums do not seriously undertake mentoring the next generation . . . that leadership will be taken over by people whose principle concerns are not museums.”
Beyond a (hopefully) temporary crisis, mentoring could advance the field on a long-term basis. The mentorships that are established in museums, such as those for interns or informal partnerships, consistently and greatly benefit their participants. By drawing and expanding upon these instances, museums could aid not only their own staff members but also the field at large. “Everyone—in every specialty—in a museum benefits from the opportunity to talk with colleagues who have struggled with the very same issues or problems they are facing, whether successfully or not,” notes Sean Fearns, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration Museum. “The institution better serves the public, can be more creative and uses limited time more efficiently when you tap into the real-life experiences and sounding board provided by a mentor.”
Good mentors support the transfer of information, wisdom and skills, providing advice and inspiration. They satisfy mentees’ desire to learn and grow, to achieve more than they thought possible. It is largely mentees’ responsibility, however, to drive the mentoring process. They must determine the type and amount of guidance they need and take the initiative to ask for it. Most mentoring relationships start and develop because the mentee initiates communications—via e-mail or telephone or in person.
Though generally aware of how mentors could enhance their professional success, many emerging and mid-level museum professionals do not search for one—or simply do not know how. Sylvea Hollis, outreach coordinator at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, came aboard in August 2006 as a relative newcomer to the field and easily managed to find mentors within the institution. Some of her emerging-professional peers have not been as lucky, though. “It seems like the field is kind of top-heavy, with a lot of people very focused on their career,” she says. “It’s hard to identify how to best help fill in this gap. A lot of [the problem] is not knowing where to start.”
Gen Xers, Gen Yers and Millennials sometimes shy away from mentoring, valuing input from their peer groups instead. The younger generations may rely more heavily on one another in part because the field has grown dramatically and responsibilities at senior levels have increased, leaving little time for staff at different levels to meet and talk. But less experienced professionals who want to acquire sophisticated thinking and make quantum leaps within the field must gravitate toward and be exposed to professionals with higher skill levels and experience.
Hollis says she’s established a good mix of both types of bonds. Along with her traditional mentoring relationships, she regularly gets together with fellow young museum staffers to tour exhibitions and engage in other cultural activities. During the outings, “We talk to each other a lot about our professions and about the field in general, be it art, be it history. . . . We all lean on each other pretty heavily. We have a good time talking about what we’re seeing at our vantage point, our predictions for the future.” The input from peers is as valuable as that from more senior professionals, she says, because it requires less explaining. “I don’t want to say it’s like therapy, but emotionally we’re able to see the same things.”
Communication is easier among peers in a technical sense as well. Emerging professionals often prefer to communicate by e-mail versus a face-to-face interchange. “Face-to-face is definitely much more personal, but in a way some questions are easier to ask via e-mail,” Hollis explains. “If you’re trying to get advice about a mistake you made, it’s easier to type that than to talk about it.” The same does not go for typically less technologically savvy senior professionals. If the potential mentor is a baby boomer, he or she might not naturally use technology to communicate, relying instead on one-on-one meetings or phone conversations.
Julie Johnson, John Roe Distinguished Chair of Museum Leadership at the Science Museum of Minnesota, says it’s an issue of style. She has a long history as both a museum mentor and mentee; currently, she engages with six young professionals in a group mentoring relationship and considers eight other colleagues mentees as well. Though, as a former classroom teacher, Johnson says she prefers in-person exchanges, she works around her mentees’ needs by using whatever medium is easiest for each. “Baby boomers like me didn’t grow up with technology . . . so the only way you really mentored with people was face-to-face—which in some ways limited the mentor pool because it had to be somebody close by,” she says. “I try to look at it as an opportunity to explore this other mentoring, though in my heart of hearts I have this preference for face-to-face.”
Although opinions differed among generations on how mentoring should be conducted, there was a consensus at the “Mentoring Matters” session regarding the challenges and misconceptions of finding a mentor or being a mentee. Along with not knowing where to locate them, young professionals said they fear rejection from potential mentors—and worry that more senior professionals might think junior colleagues are after their jobs. Mentors, on the other hand, are often unaware that the interest in such a relationship even exists. Both sides doubt they will have enough time to commit to the partnership.
| While some of these concerns are valid, others are solely assumptions. Many leaders take pride in being a mentor and are disappointed when they are not asked. To avoid suspicion or confusion during this initial stage, Johnson says dialogue is key. The mentee must go in knowing and being able to clearly state what he or she wants to accomplish. While these objectives will likely change over time, at the outset a mentee typically needs help achieving a development plan, opportunities to strengthen skills and gain technical knowledge, insights into institutional culture or simply feedback to increase self-awareness. Johnson suggests practicing communicating these objectives to a peer before officially asking.
| If the response is a simple, absolute “no,” the mentee should ask that person to recommend someone else. It’s more good practice, as finding a mentor is a process that will have to be repeated over time. As Jon West-Bey, founder and executive director of the American Poetry Museum in Washington, D.C., suggests, museum professionals will need different mentors as their careers develop. “It is important to have an appropriate mentor at different points in one’s career. In the beginning, it is important to have someone who can teach you how to follow, and later in one’s career someone to teach you how to lead.”
As for time constraints, Johnson maintains that it all depends on your mindset. How highly do you value your own professional development and that of your colleagues? “If you’re acculturated in an organization where even ongoing professional development is viewed as ‘extra,’ then mentoring is just one of those things where you go, ‘Well, I really don’t have time for that,’” Johnson says. “We never have enough time; we never have enough resources. But we can figure out how to make time. Definitely there are balancing acts, but I think the payoff in the long run is really powerful.”
Similarly, finding a mentor doesn’t have to be as difficult as some perceive. Those seeking a mentor should look for competent, senior professionals they respect and can learn from, and who have strengths that they would like to develop. Potential mentors don’t necessarily need to be in the same institution—or even the same field—as long as they possess these qualities. “We tend to be siloed in the sense that, if I’m from a science museum, why would I think about asking someone from the art museum field to mentor me?” Johnson notes. “In terms of people I mentor, some are in art museums, some are in aquariums, some are in zoos . . . but they all find benefits in something about the relationship.”
When a museum professional asks another to be a mentor, the arrangement is a type of formal mentoring—referred to as Mentoring with a capital “M”—that does not regularly appear in the museum field. There are a few museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, that have developed formal mentoring programs for their interns and/or fellows. These programs are endorsed by senior management and are an offshoot of the museums’ efforts to encourage a more diverse pool of museum professionals. A few people volunteer to participate; many others are asked or even cajoled into it, fearing that being a mentor will require too much time.
Those who do commit to such programs tend to find them surprisingly painless—even gratifying. Recalling his first mentoring experience, Norman O. Burns, executive director of the Maymont Foundation in Richmond, says, “With great excitement I explained both my ideas and ignorance for the job [to my mentor]. I remember the smile on his face that I interpreted that day as humor at my plight and naivety. Now—years later—I understand it was pure joy over being reminded of the boundless energy and creativity that comes from not knowing any better.
“A good mentor gets just as much out of the relationship,” he continues. “While the mentors provide the sage wisdom of both successes and failures that guides the mentees, they in return receive that connection to the energy and passion that brought us all into the field. This yin and yang of experience versus energy is at the heart of any successful mentoring relationship.”
A number of formal mentoring programs exist among regional associations. The Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC), for example, has a program that is “designed to link experienced museum professionals with those who are new to the field or who find themselves in positions with unfamiliar responsibilities.” Once a match is made, participants receive guidelines; a two-year commitment to the program is expected. SEMC Director Richard Waterhouse explains, “The program started because the conference was getting a lot of calls from individuals who needed technical assistance in the field. SEMC would then place that individual in touch with someone who they felt could help.” SEMC’s mentoring program has been in existence for 10 years and has had as many as 25 to 30 mentor/mentee pairs at a time. Such arrangements seem to be catching on: The Texas Association of Museums Educators’ Committee created a similar matching program in 2007, pairing museum educators by geography rather than by discipline.
Still, there is much more informal mentoring, or small “m” mentoring, in the museum field than there are Mentoring relationships. In mentoring, the mentee often does not even let the mentor know that he/she is regarded as such, yet thinks of the mentor as a wise and trusted advisor/coach/cheerleader. These relationships start in many ways, including phone calls to ask for advice, discussions at conferences or simply meeting in one’s own museum with someone one to two jobs ahead. They help the mentee grow—at the institution, in the field and as a person.
Museum professionals often speak highly of “m”entoring. Denise Gray, senior education program manager at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), considers her boss at her first long-term museum job a mentor. Though she was in an entry-level position, Gray recalls that her mentor treated her with respect and offered her opportunities that she wouldn’t normally have received. For example, she was asked to write for a documentary catalogue for MOCA’s Public + Artist Program. Gray described the experience—her first major writing assignment as a museum professional—as a challenge “beyond my normal capacity of booking tours, attaining and distributing exhibition research materials for staff, keeping statistics and assisting with grant reports. My mentor acknowledged not just my writing skills, but also urged me to think more about why we bothered to do the work we do.”
In the corporate world, mentoring is used as a tool for succession planning. The present generation of museum leadership should consider the value of mentoring in creating the next one. Directors should make it known that they want to be mentors, serving as models and letting staff know how much they have personally benefited from these relationships. Senior staff should provide and engage in mentor/mentee training, advising potential mentors on how to coach and guide mentees and instructing mentees how to track down, approach and work best with a mentor.
Promoting mentorships in museums would not only prepare the field for the future; it also could help retain its rising stars. Museums’ notorious lack of monetary compensation often leads to the loss of promising newcomers. Mentoring can counter this trend. “I think mentoring has the ability to keep people engaged in the field,” Johnson says. “A couple people I’ve mentored have said, ‘If it weren’t for a few words you said when I was ready to throw in the towel’ . . . Something I said made them stop and say, let me try it from a different point of view.
“I think there’s some sort of power in a good mentoring relationship. There’s a lot of us out there that contribute in this way, and it would be nice if there were more of us.”
Wendy Luke works with museum staff to retain and develop curators, administrators and educators who connect with visitors, donors and each other. She founded Luke Weil & Associates in 1990 with her business and life partner, Stephen E. Weil.
Amanda Kodeck is manager of school programs at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, where she organizes all K–12 programming, teacher training, outreach and studio classes, home school programs and Web-based teacher resources.
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