Mentoring is an integral part of the Associateship of the Museums Association (AMA) professional development scheme. While the mentee takes overall responsibility for their own professional development, the mentor provides a range of support and advice.
Mentors and mentees have at least three or four meetings a
year over the course of the AMA scheme, and there is usually additional contact
by email and phone.
At the outset, it is important to establish a clear framework for the relationship. The Museums Association (MA) provides a mentoring agreement document, which outlines the frequency of meetings and other aspects, such as the best way to contact the mentor.
But it is still important for the mentor and mentee to establish trust and rapport on a personal level.
“Fundamentally, it is a relationship – the mentee has to get on with the mentor and feel they can chat to them quite openly,” says Emma Shepley, a freelance curator who has been an AMA mentor for 10 years.
Often mentees begin by wanting to develop in a range of different areas, and over the course of the programme find a stronger career direction, says Shepley. In her view, a critical skill for enabling this progression is being able to listen to mentees and allow them to develop solutions themselves, rather than wading in immediately with advice.
“There is some direct advice-giving, but equally with lots of the issues, the mentee knows how to get there – it is just about providing a forum where they can work through thoughts in a very constructive and supportive environment,” she says.
“It’s about really trying to get at what the mentee is passionate about and how to get them there, putting your own career and sense of how things work to one side.”
It is also important to be able to link the mentee up with
contacts outside their own institution. “Sometimes when the mentee brings up a
particular issue, you can give them advice on who to talk to and what networks
to join,” says Shepley.
Mentoring that takes place as part of the AMA involves a range of structured activities, including working on the mentee’s professional development plan.There is, however, also room to discuss confidential topics, which may relate to problems in the workplace or anxiety over exam preparation.
Essentially a mentoring session will involve a mixture of formal and informal activities. “You might work through the plan in quite a formal way, and then move on to an informal chat that is much more wide-ranging,” she says.
Nazeea Elahi, who was mentored by Shepley and currently works as a cataloguing assistant at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, says that it is important for a mentor to be approachable and respond promptly to contact. “It’s nice to have someone that you have a personal relationship with, and can bounce ideas off and discuss things with,” says Elahi.
The support she received gave Elahi the confidence to move out of her comfort zone. She was encouraged to do things that she would never have thought of or had the confidence to, such as co-authoring a paper for an academic journal and joining Twitter.
While the AMA uses one-to-one mentoring, it is possible to design schemes that support the organisation rather than an individual. For example, Arts Council England’s (ACE) Museum Mentoring scheme sees mentors help small museums gain or retain Accreditation.
Elaine Sansom, a museums and heritage consultant who is a mentor for the AMA and has also been responsible for developing a pool of Accreditation mentors for ACE, says that such a scenario shares a lot in common with one-to-one mentoring.
“The skills you are looking for are the ability to listen, to reflect on what you’ve heard, to raise pertinent questions and to challenge where the person or organisation is,” she says.
Sansom says that in her experience, Accreditation mentoring tends
to involve significant professional development on the mentor’s behalf.
“Mentors would come with a raft of very useful experiences – but unless they had done a huge amount in the sector, there would be gaps in their own personal knowledge and experience.”
Part of the mentor’s role was to recognise those gaps and stretch their mentoring capabilities to address them so they were better able to lead other museums, she explains.
A different kind of dynamic again is found in so-called group peer mentoring, where a small group of people work together on a common issue or learning need.
Lucy Marder, the cultural partnerships officer for the South East Museum Development Programme, says that her organisation supports professionals in the region in forming peer development groups. It does this by identifying and brokering possible connections, and offering ongoing background support, such as signposting expertise and resolving conflicts.
Marder says that commitment from all participants is important if these groups are to work successfully. “If some people turn up and others don’t – or some are less willing than others to share their own insights or challenges, others begin to feel that there is not a fair reciprocity of value in the relationship,” she says.
Group mentoring can be especially beneficial for building networks and generating collaborative projects.
But even with one-to-one mentoring, mentors can get a huge
amount from the relationship. “People coming into the profession are full of
ideas, enthusiasm, new skills and new knowledge – you can learn a lot from them,”
says Shepley.