by Danny Mucinskas
Throughout our lives, we will meet countless individuals and be exposed to the stories of thousands of other people through mass media. The relationships that we develop, whether direct interpersonal relationships (such as a deep friendship or family bond) or parasocial relationships (such as being a fan of a celebrity) can have profound effects on our values, identity development, decisions, and actions. Consider:
What types of relationships in your life have influenced you in positive and negative ways?
Is there a particular person or persons who shaped who you are today?
Have you held this role for someone else in your life? Do you think you’ve helped shape who they are in positive ways?
In various lines of qualitative work carried out by The Good Project, related to both the way that adolescents navigate the world and how adults conduct their professional lives, we have often focused on two specific types of influential relationships. Research participants have spoken about:
Role models. These are people who others often seek to imitate or emulate based on some characteristic, behavior, or set of achievements in a particular field. People often find them to be inspiring and to represent something that they seek to accomplish themselves and are described as “looked up to.” While people often have a direct relationship with their role models (e.g., an older sibling), it is also frequently the case that role models are widely recognized individuals who may not know the people who are emulating them (e.g., a widely known author).
Mentors. These are people who others look to for guidance. Unlike role models, mentors (e.g., a teacher or a close colleague in a leadership position) are by necessity always known well to those they are advising, who are often seeking to follow in their footsteps. Mentors are often people who have experience or knowledge of a particular domain and can provide their mentees with support or feedback that can be actively used towards achieving the goals or ambitions of the mentee.
From research, we know that having role models is important for a variety of reasons. For example, role models are often responsible for increasing motivation towards goal achievement (Morgenroth et al., 2015), for setting examples of how one wants to work (particularly in parental role modeling; Wiese & Freunde, 2011), and can even inspire others to make bold decisions like starting a company (Bosma et al., 2012). Role modeling is also potentially associated with the development of character strengths (Johnson et al., 2016), with advancement of values like multicultural harmony (Onyekwuluje, 2000) and has been found to influence certain health outcomes (Yancey et al., 2011).
Similarly, mentorship is also tied to a variety of positive outcomes and is often important in directly transmitting interpersonal support. In the health professions, mentorship models are relied upon for the sharing of knowledge, values, and emotional encouragement between older and younger members of the workforce (Henry-Noel et al., 2018), while mentors who embodied a “Close Connector” relationship model were found in one study to be most beneficial for youth outcomes (Austin et al., 2020). In the business world, 75% of executives say that having a mentor has been important to their careers, and 90% of workers with professional mentors are happy at work. It is clear, then, that across the lifespan, a relationship with a mentor can assist people in growing their skills and reaching their potential.
The demonstrated benefits of finding role models and mentors prompts all of us working in education to help young people to cultivate and maintain these types of relationships. From The Good Project’s years of investigating and speaking to individuals about these relationships, we have developed several insights which may not only be helpful for educators but also for adults as they do their work across the lifespan.
We are all members of a multitude of communities, whether the city or town where we live, schools, families, workplaces, hobby groups, and more. We can each find and connect with mentors or role models in any one of these environments or circumstances. In an educational context, by allowing students to choose personally meaningful role models or mentors from any arena of life, the likelihood increases that students will make choices that represent a diversity of voices and identities. Thinking expansively about who might be a role model or mentor reduces the reliance on easy answers or moral paragons who might often be held up as exemplars but who may seem one-dimensional or out of reach (e.g., Mother Teresa, George Washington).
No mentor or role model is perfect, and there may be a temptation for all of us to find one singular individual who possesses a multitude of admirable qualities or who is in exactly the right position to provide future career advice. Instead of looking for one individual, we have learned that it is possible for people to engage in “frag-mentoring.” Frag-mentoring is the concept that we can have several mentors at once, dependent on their qualities and their areas of expertise. For example, one might choose a senior colleague at work as a mentor for their tenacity and wisdom, even if they aren’t always someone who displays warmth as a friend, and also have a religious leader as a mentor for their spiritual devotion and community leadership, even if they aren’t always organized. The counsel or example of each one of these individuals might serve different purposes in particular circumstances, dependent upon one’s needs.
Negative examples can be equally as powerful as positive ones. While the definitions of role models and mentors we offered above presuppose positive interactions or a desire to mirror, the opposite may also be true. People who don’t embody the expectations or qualities we value in others, such as a micromanaging boss or a noncommittal family member, can still be instructive from an opposite vantage point. What is it about these individuals that encapsulates what we don’t want to be like, and could their example serve as an “anti-mentor”?
Concrete and direct action can come from mentorship or role model imitation with planning. Identifying individuals worth emulating as role models or interacting with as mentors is a first step, but the qualities or goals that make these people inspiring and worthwhile exemplars should be specifically named. Naming the qualities of a role model specifically or the goals that a mentor can support can be a tool for intention-setting and getting down to the particulars of what might be productive and life-changing about these relationships. For institutions like schools and workplaces, defined programs can also make mentoring concrete, such as a guest speaker series or a peer mentoring program.
While these insights may help a general audience think about mentors and role models, it can simultaneously be difficult to identify boundaries on who is a suitable individual to fulfill those roles. Notably, in forthcoming data collected by The Good Project, students (primarily secondary schoolers) were asked in an at-home reflection activity to identify multiple exemplars of “good work.” Analysis of their responses revealed that youth are already drawing on both close (e.g., family) and distant (e.g., celebrity) role models and that the qualities they admire in these individuals also cross a variety of complex dimensions of character strengths, including intellectual, moral, and performance character. Yet while these findings are encouraging, students often spoke of business leaders who have questionable scruples (e.g., Elon Musk) as people worthy of imitation as role models.
While we believe in the idea identified above (that no mentor or role model candidate is perfect), every individual represents a complicated totality of decisions, experiences, and interactions with others and the world. As a project that believes in excellence, engagement, and ethics in human pursuits, The Good Project’s stance is to encourage the choice of mentors and role models who embody convictions and virtues with universal appeal, including common good, equity, empathy, perspective-taking, and sustainability. To complete the three-dimension framework of “good work” that is at the center of our project, leaders who are excellent and engaged in their pursuits must also be ethical.
Some further resources related to role models and mentors that you could explore are:
Our sets of activities related to mentors and role models.
Nobel Prize in Mentorship?, a blog post by Lynn Barendsen about the power of mentoring relationships.
The Making of a Professional, a blog post by Howard Gardner that touches upon the way that models can assist professional development.
Good Work and How It Happens, a blog post by Arlene Pang about becoming a teacher and how mentorship played a role in her experience.
This list of role model resources compiled after conversation with teachers.
Two dilemmas touching on mentorship: Mentorship at a Distance and What’s a Mentor?.
