Mentoring

Don’t Let Mentoring Burn You Out

Here’s how to spot the signs before you become exhausted.

by

and

W. Brad Johnson

by

and

W. Brad Johnson

July 29, 2022

Britt Erlanson/Getty Images

Summary.

Mentoring is undoubtedly a high-impact and high-stakes relationship. Mentors give their time, attention, and resources to develop others. Usually a volunteer activity, mentorship goes above and beyond a person’s formal job requirements. But when a mentor is well-intended but too depleted to deliver essential mentor functions as a consequence of burnout, the result is marginal mentoring: dysfunctional or disengaged mentoring that is no longer of value.

If you continue to deplete your energy to mentor, no matter how good your intentions, you will eventually be unable to mentor or help anyone at all. Here are some ways to identify and overcome mentor burnout: Know the signs and routinely evaluate your burnout risk factors, and involve someone to help you identify when you’re showing symptoms. Conserve your mentoring efforts by finding ways to maximize your time while broadening your reach. Change your approach to make mentoring fun and energy generating. Finally, talk about burnout openly to model self-awareness and self-care.

Mentors give their time, attention, and resources to develop others. Usually a volunteer activity, mentorship goes above and beyond a person’s formal job requirements. Junior members of any organization seem to intuitively identify and gravitate toward the most impactful mentors, and those mentors — often already quite busy — find the demand from prospective mentees steadily rising. As a consequence, great mentors can easily get overcommitted, overwhelmed, and ultimately less effective in their mentor role.

Ruth Gotian is the chief learning officer and assistant professor of education in anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and the author of The Success Factor. She was named the world’s #1 emerging management thinker by Thinkers50. You can access her free list of conversation starters.
RuthGotian
CP

Christine Pfund is a senior scientist with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). Pfund’s work focuses on developing and studying interventions to optimize research mentoring relationships. Pfund coauthored the original Entering Mentoring curriculum and has led many studies investigating the effectiveness of this approach. She is director of the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experience in Research at UW-Madison (CIMER) and the National Research Mentoring Network Coordination Center. She was a member of the National Academies committee that published the consensus report and online guide The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM.
CC

Chaveso “Chevy” Cook, PhD, is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel currently serving in battalion command at Fort Meade, MD. Chevy draws on experiences as the Executive Director of the nonprofit Military Mentors, as a training facilitator with the Center for Mentoring Excellence, and as a former instructor at the United States Military Academy. He is also as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Ethics in International Affairs, and the American Psychological Association.
W. Brad Johnson is a professor of psychology in the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law at the United States Naval Academy and a faculty associate in the Graduate School of Education at Johns Hopkins University. He is the coauthor of Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace, Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women, The Elements of Mentoring, and other books on mentorship.

Don’t Let Mentoring Burn You Out

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