What do you think about Mentoring?

What do you think about Mentoring?

Have members of this community had experience with mentoring? May I ask that you share your experience - good or bad - with mentors? I am doing some research to try to learn "best practices" with mentoring and have been finding a good deal of confusion - even misinformation on the mentoring process and nobody seems to know what works, or why.

While I think many - probably most mentors sincerely want to help others, there is sometimes an "superior, subordinate" vibe that turns me off. The approach that one person took to success can seldom be taken by another; "No man can step in the same river twice" as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said 2,600 years ago, "for it's not the same river and he's not the same man". Suppose you got Elon Musk to give you a half hour of his time as a mentor. Would he be able to help? Probably not - that wouldn't even be near enough time to learn about your business and life situation to be able to give sound advice.

I started thinking about this when I came across this remarkable video: "Why you shouldn't trust successful people's advice" - it is a devastating, almost mathematical takedown of what I think are some of the base assumptions about mentoring - that if you get your information and emulate successful people, you too will be successful. https://goo.gl/LuCSvV

It also cleared up a mystery that has perplexed me for some time: why in the world do people ask me for business advice - I am hardly a stunning model of success. Considering the information in this video, however, it does make a certain amount of sense. When you are thinking of buying some product, do you only talk with those who have had great success with that product and love it? - of course not - what if for every person who liked the product hundreds hated it? Talking only to those who love the product would give you highly distorted information.

Still, we know that mentoring does work at least sometimes, but do we know why? It occurred to me that maybe it isn't just the mentoring helping, maybe it is something else. We already know that humans respond to the simple act of being observed. This was established in the 1940's at General Electric with the famous Hawthorne experiments - a team investigating factors related to employee performance found that no matter what they did employee performance improved.

The simple act of "observing" changed employees behavior - usually for the better. Because of this, the team doing the research had to give up their experiment concluding that "you can't study people without changing the results". This became a kind of "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" for people: you can't study - or even observe any system related to people without changing that system. There can be no neutral observer.

There is another "substance" in mentoring programs that could also be causing this success and that is simple "accountability". People are always advising entrepreneurs to get an "accountability parter" and it is also fairly well documented that this works. Could some mentoring programs be adding this element almost by accident?

I've noticed that in my community there is a great deal of competition for mentors and most people people don't get one - which is why I have always been a big believer in "peer mentoring" programs, though they seem to be few and far between. I could go on here but I would like to know your opinion, or experience. Do you have a mentor - or have you tried to get one? What has worked, and what hasn't?