Mentors VS Students

[dcbrown]

This is always a pressure point within organizations that generates lots of "issues". At a simplistic level, groups go through the forming, norming, storming, and performing stages... but often get stuck in "storming" due to conflicting goals and expectations. I see this come up often when team leadership vs membership have different ideas or goals on where they are headed.

My motto has been you can't succeed without failure. It may sound funny, but in general I find this true. If you succeed, you typically are not 100% absolutely positively sure on why you succeeded. But have a failure? Oh boy, hindsight is great isn't it!

Mentors can either hide the experience of failure or support the right of a student in gaining that experience. This may sound cruel or cold or heartless -- but in the longer view my personal experience has been that it is always the better choice. Ok, as a mentor its not "fun" to watch and you end up biting your tongue a lot, but still...

The problem is how much failure do you allow to occur (no one LIKES to fail or PLANS to fail... but it happens anyway). Certainly where any safety issue exists, the "responsible adult" in us must step forward to prevent bad things from happening. But as a mentor I'd rather support a crappy design and the passion behind it (while pointing out some possible pitfalls/weaknesses based upon experience) rather than killing off the enthusiasm by seemingly taking over.

Whether the team is mentor run, student staffed or student run, mentor advised or some other combination, this is fine as long as all team members understand that is the team culture and buy-in.

One last thought. Just as you cannot be a leader without followers, you cannot have a team without students.

But that is just another set of random opinions.