Karima-Catherine Goundiam is the founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2BeeMatch.
In the business world, mentoring is an important practice, but there’s a glaring imbalance – women’s mentoring programs are everywhere, while men’s mentoring programs are nearly non-existent. Why?
Let’s start by defining the notion of mentorship. It is a relationship focused on advice, guidance and support from an experienced person to a less experienced person. But it’s also an umbrella term that can include a number of different dynamics. For example, mentorship can be formal, such as through a program, or informal, based on a naturally established connection between two people. It might include sponsorship – advocating for and endorsing the person as well as helping them in their career advancement – but it doesn’t have to; a mentor can remain behind the scenes. Sometimes mentorship happens in groups and sometimes it’s one-on-one. It can be done traditionally, such as when an older and more experienced person mentors a younger and less experienced person, or in reverse, when a more junior person helps a more senior person to understand new trends, technologies or approaches. You can even do peer-to-peer mentoring.
I’m a strong believer in the value of mentorship as a practice. I’ve received great mentorship throughout my journey as an entrepreneur, and I’ve actively provided it, too. However, when it comes to formal mentorship programs, I take issue with the fact that so many of them target women and people of colour while few, if any, are available for men.
The assumption seems to be that women and people of colour need formal mentoring to succeed in a male-dominated business world, while men, particularly white men, don’t require the same structured support. This disparity is built on a set of troubling societal and business assumptions. Let’s pick them apart.
The question of skills
First, workplaces and businesses erroneously assume that men, especially white men, naturally have certain business skills. That’s not necessarily the case. And it means that these men don’t have as many opportunities to learn. After all, mentorship aims to support someone as they approach something they cannot do yet, against a benchmark of what they need to be able to do to succeed. If you don’t see a need, you won’t try to meet it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The assumption that certain men will naturally be successful also leads to drastic funding disparities for women entrepreneurs, biased hiring and more. It means that instead of getting mentored into success, white men are simply given ample permission to fail and ample new chances to try again. Meanwhile, women and people of colour are asked to prove themselves at every juncture and are given little leeway to make mistakes.
The question of business culture
When the business world assumes that most men have innate business skills, that creates a skewed business culture. In this context, success can be more difficult to achieve for “outsiders” – such as women and people of colour. As a result, we assume that they don’t innately have business skills and therefore need help. “Outsiders,” meaning everyone else, need to be mentored into the dominant business culture because it operates on a set of unwritten rules they need to learn.
This state of affairs means that women and people of colour are seen as forever needing help that white men don’t – no matter what their actual skill set. At best this is erroneous and therefore not useful, as it downplays the very real competency some people bring to the table. At worst, it’s infantilizing. But beyond that individual poor fit, it also locates the problem within the “outsiders,” teaching them to individually adapt rather than addressing the structural roots of the issue that keep them “outside” in the first place.
A different way to correct the imbalance
What if we took a few steps back and looked at the whole situation, and then made efforts to rebalance it?
I think business mentorship programs should be structured around skill sets and other types of common ground – helping people of all genders and races succeed based on whatever their starting point or specific challenges might be. Gender, race and other personal features aren’t what determines a person’s needs. Mentoring should be about meeting people where they’re at and helping them succeed, not about predetermining a person’s needs depending on what social category they fall into.
Certainly, if women and people of colour want to seek mutual support in closed groups, that’s not wrong. But formally structured mentorship programs for these groups, in my experience, assume you have the same problems as the next person in that category, which is often not the case. And they’re more likely to teach “outsiders” to adapt to a majority business culture and play the game than to address actual skills gaps – or, critically, funding gaps – in a meaningful way.
As a member of several different minority groups – I’m a Black francophone woman – I don’t see the value in being separated for mentorship. Not only for us as women and people of colour, but also in that having us around helps teach white people and men how it is to work with us.
What about mentorship for men?
Like anyone else, men sometimes don’t have all the skills they need, so skills-based mentorship groups that explicitly include men would be a great idea. Let’s stop reinforcing the idea that white men already know everything. This notion ends up shaming those who don’t, and it’s not realistic for anyone. All it does is maintain an illusion, which men are then under pressure to uphold without true support.
Many men also need to be mentored to learn more about how to be inclusive. They need to learn how to work with people who are not men and who are otherwise not like themselves. As long as the business world is driven and built by men, and the majority of the money is in the hands of men, everyone else will have to bend to their rules unless men actively learn – and teach each other – how to work better across difference. This is crucial work that has the potential to impact both today’s business world and future generations of business people.
Ultimately, white men could benefit from more mentoring, while women and people of colour could benefit from more funding – a more balanced approach that would better meet the needs of all people in today’s business world.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.