Mentorship in Competition
This past month we celebrated mentors. Many of us remember a timeless piece of advice one of our mentors gave us, and being a competitive bunch, we’ve put them head to head to see which one will be crowned the Fiscal Year 21 March Mentor Madness Champion. Throughout March, PMAA members voted in head-to-head matchups narrowing the field each week.
In a real Cinderella story, out of nowhere, come-from-behind finish, this year’s winner is….
“Never assume malice when incompetence would suffice”
PMAA members submitted pieces of mentors’ advice, then voted on their favorite, to celebrate March Mentorship Madness.
While I wasn’t clever enough to submit it, it is a piece of wisdom I’ve heard over the years. It has been variously attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William James, among others. Better researchers than I trace its current form to Robert J. Hanlon who had been a computer programmer at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
On its own, wisdom like this can seem like a cliché—a, “tell me something I don’t know” moment. But the truth about mentoring is that it’s not the advice that really matters, it's the connection to the generations of public servants that have come before, and our commitment to those who will come after. Our mentors have invested in us because they were wise enough to see that a more perfect union is not a work of years, or even generations. It is a work of centuries, and none of us will get to complete it in our own lifetime. Sometimes they invest in us because they see some spark of their younger selves, or they recognize a calling to service in us. Sometimes it's simply because we're in the right place at the right time, and teaching the next generation is part of their understanding of public service.
As my role has shifted and I am now a mentor more often than I am a mentee, some of the most powerful moments are when I realize the piece of wisdom I have to pass on is inherited from one of my mentors. I know them well enough to believe they got it from their mentor before them. This kind of hand me down wisdom is shopworn and sometimes a bit trite, but it is also an expression of faith that the new bright young faces walking into our agencies will carry on the torch. If we teach them well, they will become the kind of leaders that intervene in pulling an emotionally-charged new analyst aside and say, “It might not be what you think, remember, never assume malice when incompetence would suffice.”