Unfinished …
We are all just walking each other home. — Ram Dass
The human tendency to tell others how they should was eagerly endorsed and institutionalized in the workplace. And it comes by the best names — feedbacking, coaching, counselling, mentoring. We do not question their purpose, merit, or end. The work environment is extraordinarily patient and forgiving towards all our blatant and eager efforts to make others more like us so that we like them more. To improve them.
Or so we tell ourselves.
Among those efforts, mentoring probably has the best press. A relationship where a more experienced person passes knowledge down to someone earlier in their journey. An apparent mandate to dispense wisdom downward. We have this romanticized — even if slightly patronizing — image in mind of a senior executive sitting down with a junior manager over coffee to share how they successfully arrived at their current station. How they bravely beat the odds and prevailed in the end. And how — they believe — we could too.
If we follow their advice, that is.
No wonder much of this amounts to enduring an old man’s bragging in expectation of career sponsorship. Yet it does not have to come to that.
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We spend much of our time in management assuming people are broken and in need of repair. Dropping that delusion is unbelievably liberating. You realize how presumptuous and exhausting this burden was. You start looking at mentees as unfinished, but not deficient. Not whole, but not broken either.
Over time, you start noticing they are superior in many ways.
You approach the relationship assuming their inadequacy and end up discovering your own. You start with the intent to fix others and end by accepting that you are both incomplete. You realize neither of you was sick in the first place. Healing turns out to be reciprocal.
You become less eager to teach, more prepared to co-experience. Less of an instructor, more of a companion. The mentor enters the relationship believing they have more to give than to receive. Over time, in trying to help another person stand more firmly, you discover where you yourself are still unsteady. You get influenced by those you influence. Your broken arms heal themselves around them, to borrow and paraphrase an evocative line from Galway Kinnell’s poem on fatherhood and impermanence.
The distinction between ‘mentor’ and ‘mentee’ becomes almost administrative. A casting decision. Two temporary, fallible, aging, unfinished creatures merely meeting for a while. In a few years neither of you will occupy these roles. Both will eventually disappear from each other’s daily lives.
Suddenly the urge to improve, correct, shape, and fix another person feels much less compelling. Companionship becomes more important than instruction. You indeed start walking each other home.
Look at mentoring as a temporary encounter between two unfinished companions. You are granted a brief season in one another’s company. You are both passing through. With little time to share.
We are unfinished not because something is wrong with us. We are unfinished because life is not done with us. At least not quite yet …
