Ashleigh Shelby Rosette on Mentoring

What makes a mentor memorable? How do you help someone build confidence — not just competence?

Who was the best mentor you ever had and what made them so effective for you?

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I don’t think that I can point to a single “best” mentor because what I’ve needed has evolved across different phases of my career. I’ve been very fortunate to have people who have poured into me in different ways. In my academic career, the first was my Ph.D. advisor, Jeanne Brett. During the first year of my doctoral program, I had taken over this research project from another Ph.D. student who wanted to move on to a different topic. After a couple of months of working on the project, I was in Jeanne’s office and showed her the findings. She paused and then said, “Would you like to go to San Sebastian, Spain, and present these results?” I was so surprised. It wasn’t just about the opportunity to go to Spain. Although let’s be real, that was part of it, I had never been to Spain before. But it was really about what her asking me that question meant. She saw me as a scholar before I could completely see myself that way. That experience taught me that one of the most powerful things a mentor can do is to create opportunities that make people see themselves differently. 

The late Kathy Phillips was another important mentor to me. I always would reach out to her during major career transitions. She had an amazing ability to help me step back and see my career through a broader lens that helped me make more thoughtful decisions. And finally, I’ve also come to value what Erika James, the dean at Wharton, calls “friendtors.” It’s a friend who is also your mentor. I’ve had this group of professor girlfriends for years, many of us started our doctoral programs around the same time. They have supported me, challenged me and have told me not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear. 

So, for me, mentorship has not really been about having one “best” mentor who provides everything, but it’s been layered and especially relational and personal with different people helping me to take on different points of view.

What’s the most satisfying experience you’ve ever had as a mentor?

I get immense satisfaction from seeing my students succeed. As an advisor, there is something really special about seeing your doctoral students publish their first journal article, get their first job and eventually earn tenure – and seeing other early career scholars that you’ve advised along the way reach these same milestones. You remember where they started and know how much hard work and resilience and growth went into them reaching that point. It makes you just so proud to see them grow into the scholar you always knew they could become.

With students that I’ve taught in the classroom, that sense of satisfaction is a little different and often unexpected. It might be an email or DM that arrives months or even years later where a former student shares how a comment or conversation or an idea from class ended up shaping their career trajectory in some way or how they see themselves. Recently, a former student shared the slides that they had created for a speech that they’d given and told me how much of what was in the presentation they had learned in my class. What they had absolutely no way of knowing was that those slides actually helped me personally with something that I was grappling with at the time. Here they were telling me how much they had learned from me, while at the same time, giving something back to me that I needed. It was one of those full circle moments. We may have the privilege of teaching our students, but if we are fortunate, there comes a point when we get to learn from the people they become. Those moments are extremely satisfying.

Can you share an experience you found particularly challenging as a mentor? How did you resolve it?

A tough situation to navigate is when someone is capable, but they’re really struggling with their own confidence. So, it’s not about their ability or willingness to do the work, it’s more so about their own internal sense of legitimacy. I try to help them to distinguish between what is actual feedback about how well they’re doing from their own internal doubt. I try to do for them what Jeanne did for me. That means that they may have to keep moving before they are completely certain about where they’re going. Now, this is not some notion of faking it before you make it. They’ve done the work, they’re just not confident in the work that they’ve done. I try to encourage them to take a leap but at the same time letting them know that I’ll have their back if it doesn’t work out.

What insights from your work on leadership, identity and negotiations can help faculty members mentor more effectively? 

In relation to my work on leadership and identity, I’d say that mentorship is not just about developing skill. It’s also about helping mentees understand how they may be seen. One of the most consistent findings in my research is that the same behavior can be interpreted very differently depending on who is enacting it and in what context. Not everyone is given the same benefit of the doubt. For some people, mistakes can be more visible and successes less easily attributed to ability depending upon your identity. This means that mentors may sometimes need to help their mentees navigate these realities so that they are not constrained by them. They can help mentees anticipate how their reactions may be perceived, and they can help them navigate those interpretations strategically so that they can be recognized fairly. 

Another key insight comes from my work on negotiation. In traditional negotiation research, the focus is often on tactics like what to say and when to say it, but the real power can come from how you enter the negotiation. Some of my recent work focuses on how what happens internally, like our sense of self, our self-efficacy, our ability to regulate emotion, can significantly influence how we show up externally. Mentors can play an important role in helping to develop these feelings of capability. So, it’s not just about encouragement, it’s about helping them to prepare for key moments, helping them to frame their contributions and helping them to learn how to hold space in conversations. 

What advice do you have for grad students or junior academics who want the most from their mentoring relationships?

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One piece of advice that I would give is to use your mentoring relationships to help you think through risks thoughtfully. Often times what holds us back is not a lack of ability, but fear of what might happen if we fail. A mentor can help you think through two questions. What’s the worst that can happen? And if that happened, what would I do next? I learned the value of those two questions more than 30 years ago and I still use them today. Mentors can help you see the risk more clearly, gain perspective and feel better prepared for what comes next.