Accelerating Career Development through Multiple Mentoring Opportunities

August 18, 2006

American Bar Association, The Women Advocate

by Nan E. Joesten, Farella Braun + Martel LLP

            Those of us who have been blessed with the opportunity for education remember clearly those teachers who helped change the course of our lives with their wisdom, wit, and sincere interest in us, their students.  The same can be said for our progress in the legal profession.  There are numerous lawyers that we hold in high esteem due to their generosity of time, advice, and encouragement along the way.  This is the essence of mentoring:  according to Webster's, a mentor is a "trusted counselor or guide," a tutor or coach.  Harkening back to the classics, Mentor was a friend of Odysseus entrusted with the education of Odysseus' son Telemachus when Odysseus went off to fight in the Trojan War.  While the subject of increasing focus in the legal profession, mentoring is hardly new -- Aristotle once mentored Alexander the Great. 

            The goal of mentoring is to enhance professional development through effective personal relationships.  Mentoring is critical in the legal profession, where the start-up curve is steep and experience and judgment play such a critical part in one's ability to be a great lawyer.  And it's widely accepted that mentoring brings with it a plethora of benefits in terms of accelerating the progress of new attorneys, expanding the comfort level of lawyers in trying out or applying their growing skills to the challenges of their clients, and improving the retention of lawyers in the profession.  There are also potential rewards for the attorney serving as a mentor:  personal satisfaction, increased loyalty from grateful junior colleagues, appreciation from peers, greater influence within the organization.  All of these can have a positive and direct impact on the bottom line. 

Challenges to Mentoring
           So why aren't law departments and law firms flush with stories of mentoring success?  Perhaps in part because it is difficult for lawyers to carve time out of our inevitably hectic schedules to find the opportunity to act as mentors, and some lawyers make better mentors than others.  Mentoring has typically been thought of as a one-on-one relationship, most often between a junior attorney and a more experienced attorney.  While we often hope these informal relationships develop naturally over the course of cases or transactions, many organizations have formal mentoring programs where junior and senior attorneys are "assigned" to one another in a mentee-mentor relationship for some period of time.  Often the junior attorneys have input the selection of a mentor, which can improve the odds of a successful experience, but not always.  When schedules pick up, or the relationship never really takes off, the junior lawyer must cast about for other options.  In a scenario where the junior lawyer is also a woman or diverse attorney or both, the risk of being left on the outside looking in can be magnified. 

Multiple Mentoring
            One solution to the dilemma of not having any (or enough) natural mentors, or not having a designated mentoring relationship be productive is to create more opportunities for mentoring.  The problem is a shortage of good mentors, especially in organizations where senior women or diverse attorneys are in short supply.  Developing those coveted mentoring opportunities using the traditional one-to-one model can be difficult, because the most obvious way to increase mentoring is to expand the number of one-on-one mentoring relationships in which the most effective mentors engage, which time pressures frequently preclude.

            Multiple mentoring is an alternative that addresses the pressing need for mentees to have exposure to mentors where an organization has more of the former than the latter.  Admittedly, multiple mentoring doesn't offer the benefit of one-on-one mentoring in attempting to directly address one mentee's needs without a pre-set agenda.  Still, it is a model that creates opportunities for several relationships to grow while emphasizing teaching and leveraging the strengths of expertise.

Mentoring Circles
            Mentoring circles are one style of multiple mentoring that can be readily adapted to a law firm or law department setting.  In a mentoring circle, a group of mentees typically meet with one mentor.  This obviously helps address a scenario where there is an imbalance in the number of mentors and mentees, but the benefits are much broader than that.  The experienced mentor is expected to gently lead the group and offer guidance and advice on both organizational matters and fundamental core competencies of practicing law.  A good mentor should also be able to encourage the circle in combining their individual experiences and enthusiasm to help each person progress in their legal careers and comfort within the organization.  The participants in the circle benefit from learning a variety of perspectives or approaches to issues rather than only the mentor's point of view. 

Team or Group Mentoring
            Team mentoring is another variant of multiple mentoring.  With team mentoring, the group does not designate a formal mentor; instead the team members look to each other for mentoring support and guidance.  As with circle mentoring, team or group mentoring offers the advantage of having numerous participants gain from the experiences of others in the group, rather than limiting the exchange of ideas and perspectives to a one-to-one.  In a law firm or legal department setting, this encourages mentoring to occur among attorneys of varying seniority and experiences, and has the added benefit of allowing the more senior lawyers to learn directly from entry-level attorneys about the problems and challenges within the organization and the practice of law.  This type of reverse mentoring within the team can be extremely valuable in helping to keep the organization's leaders or rainmakers in touch with the experiences of more junior attorneys. 

Setting Expectations
            Multiple mentoring arrangements offer the inherent benefits of increased opportunities to build the natural relationships that can themselves be the jumping off point for informal mentoring outside of a planned relationship.  Still, there are direct benefits to be reaped by participating in a planned circle or team mentoring experience.  But as with any undertaking, the success of any multiple mentoring endeavor begins with an assessment of the expectations of all the participants:  what does each person hope to accomplish from the process?  what particular issues will the group focus on?  how will the group deal with any barriers to effectiveness that emerge during the course of the group's sessions?  what does each person expect to contribute to the process?  what does each person expect of the other group members?  how will the group assess if the process is beneficial?

Creating The Ground Rules
            Once the individual members have considered these topics individually, it is time for the group to come together to reach agreement on their fundamental ground rules.  For nearly any mentoring experiences to be successful, participants need to feel that the group is a "safe space" for sharing ideas, where one's participation and input does not result in any negative repercussions in assignments, performance reviews, and the like.  A guarantee of confidentiality is essential, and multiple mentoring groups typically operate under "Vegas Rules" - what happens in the mentoring sessions, stays in those sessions.  An effective mentoring experience requires the participants to trust one another, and maintaining confidences is paramount to developing that trust. 

            Likewise, the group must make a commitment to regular attendance at the agreed-upon meeting times and venues.  The group can decide for itself whether sessions are most productive when held in the office during business hours, over lattes at the local coffee shop, or perhaps in the privacy of someone's home over a shared meal.  No matter where and how the group decides to gather, it's important to honor the schedule and participate regularly. 

Off and Running
            The initial gathering should allow for a review of individual expectations for the group, and agreement on the group's goals and ground rules.  Once underway, participants should be committed to following up on previous discussions where appropriate, reporting back on new experiences or learnings, or evaluating the relative impact of new strategies that a group member might have tried based on previous mentoring.  As the group becomes more comfortable with one another, intermediate evaluations may be helpful to identify whether objectives are being met, what has worked best, and how the process can be further improved with a mid-course correction. 

            While no substitute for informal mentoring, established multiple mentoring opportunities can help bridge that gap for organizations that are short on effective mentors and long on attorneys seeking critical mentoring support.  So what are you waiting for?  Give it a try, and see how the effectiveness of your organization, and the satisfaction on your younger attorneys, can be multiplied.

Nan Joesten is a co-chair of the Mentoring Sub-Committee of the Woman Advocate Committee, and a partner in the Intellectual Property and Technology Department at Farella Braun & Martel LLP in San Francisco, California.  Her practice focuses on patent litigation and complex technology disputes.  She can be reached at njoesten@fbm.com.