Pro-motility agents: Mobilizing mentors to make progress

Photo Credit: Elnur - stock.adobe.com

Leadership & professional development: Pro-motility agents: Mobilizing mentors to make progress

One of the most important roles of a mentor is the ability to foresee potential roadblocks or barriers to a mentee's progress. We previously discussed one of those barriers in this journal—“poster-paresis,” when a project stalls after a successful conference presentation.¹ While those strategies address project leaders, mentors also play an important role in preventing this paralytic state by serving as “pro-motility agents.”

Mentors possess the experience and wisdom to diagnose and address common challenges mentees face in advancing projects. Doing so proactively can help mobilize mentees and their projects toward success. Which of the following exacerbating factors may be contributing?

1. Procrastination: Is the mentee putting the project off—avoiding it entirely, or shying away from specific steps?

2. Perseveration: Is the mentee agonizing over smaller details? Is this indecision out of proportion to the importance of these details?

3. Perfectionism: Has perfect become the enemy of the good?

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To address these common issues, we offer five pro-motility strategies to guide mentors in keeping mentees and projects moving.

1. Patience: Mentors must exhibit patience. This is not the same as allowing unlimited time for task completion, which can be problematic especially with procrastination. Rather, “emotional” patience puts mentees at ease, since procrastination may be a maladaptive coping mechanism for stress.² Demonstrating exasperation, frustration, disappointment, or confusion about delays is counterproductive and hurtful. Mentors can show empathy for the struggle that mentees are enduring, creating psychological safety to alleviate stress and fear of judgment.

2. Process: Mentors can clearly outline the path forward for mentees, including a distinct starting point. Next steps should be broached one at a time, with explicit description of what needs to be completed first to proceed. When mentees perseverate on a particular step, they may lack clarity on how to move forward and benefit from deadlines and check-ins tied to specific steps for accountability.

3. Pieces: Mentors can help mentees break a large project into smaller achievable pieces. This can lower the burden and overwhelm and decrease the activation energy to begin. When mentees struggle with procrastination, mentors can right-size pieces to very small steps—for example, “write the first sentence” rather than “write the introduction.”

4. Push: Mentors must know when to push, but gently. Emotional intelligence is key. They must present expectations in an environment with high levels of support, particularly with mentees suffering from anxiety. Mentors should provide perspective about how much time or effort should be allocated toward certain steps or decisions, find the appropriate places and tone to nudge them along, or help make decisions themselves on items that benefit from their expertise.

5. Product: Mentors must demonstrate to mentees the importance of a completed product—no matter how bad the first version may be. Writer Anne Lamott describes the “terrible first effort” as a natural and universal writing method.³ Mentees gripped by perfectionism must be reassured that “done is better than perfect”—drafts will always require revision, and seeing a completed product in any iteration is powerful.

These strategies are not exhaustive but, in our experience as mentees and mentors, represent common challenges mentees face in moving a project forward. Rather than judging or allowing mentees to succumb to paralysis, mentors can mobilize them by predicting potential challenges, diagnosing roadblocks, and encouraging forward motion by harnessing the power of these pro-motility strategies.

Click here to read the full article.