The Challenge of Mentoring

Continuing education for Emerging Professionals and Young Architects involves many different avenues but perhaps the hardest to define is the mentorship relationship. As a two-way dialogue, mentorship is more of a process unique to the individuals than a set lesson plan.  For many emerging professionals, finding, cultivating, and maintaining those relationships can be a somewhat vague endeavor.

In order to provide a better place to start, I sat down with my mentor Sonya Julian-Lester, AIA and her mentor William Murray, FAIA. Julian-Lester is an Associate Architect at Pfeiffer in their downtown Los Angeles office with nearly 10 years of experience as a licensed architect.  Throughout her career she has worked with many mentors to develop the skills she uses today. “My first mentor was my first employer who hired me right out of school,” she explains. “He was actually a professor. It was a small firm. I worked there for about 3 years. (I) did a little bit of everything from going through the library of materials to building models, to drawing bathrooms to drawing brick details. He was a great mentor who really took the time to review things with me. Not necessarily to show me how to do everything but to let me ask questions when I needed help.”

Julian-Lester’s current mentor, Murray, a founding Principal of Pfeiffer, agreed with the need to solve problems independently while not staying isolated. “What it used to be like when you came out of school was that you learned how to make drawings and do lettering, now with technology, kids that come out of school with these skills (in technology), they stay within this box. Because the computer makes it look so easy and so done. So they are less inquisitive.” Although generalizations, the reality of how technology has changed the field of architecture has yet to reach the discourse of how we teach according to some respondents of a 2015 survey on ArchDaily.com. (Patrick Lynch. "What Should Architecture Schools Teach Us? ArchDaily Readers Respond" 15 Dec 2015. ArchDaily. Accessed 29 Nov 2017. <https://www.archdaily.com/778846/what-should-architecture-schools-teach-us-archdaily-readers-respond/> ISSN 0719-8884) Murray emphasizes the need for curiosity saying, “The people who succeed are the ones who go get up from their desk and work with people who have been doing this for a long time. Unless someone sits with you or you say, ‘I have these drawings and I need someone to look at them with me’ then you sit at your desk working and not externalizing that process, it’s a problem.”

How big of a problem? A 2016 blog post from Revit tutorial website RevitPure (https://revitpure.com/blog/should-architecture-students-use-revit) looked at the issues from the users perspective commenting that for students, “When opening Revit for the first time, everything seems very technical. You can understand why the few students that use it in the studio get stuck on pre-made components, building projects with default families.”  This seems to be a standard response but one that other emerging professionals relate to. (https://thatarchitecturestudent.com/2016/10/12/revit-in-architecture-school/)  Author Rhodri Marsdan wrote for trending news website Digg.com about the disparity between technology and creativity commenting that, “By shouldering much of the creative burden, computer power makes us look and feel creative, and tech firms thrive on that.” http://digg.com/2016/technology-and-creativity

Inquisitiveness is clearly a requirement for Design Professionals and Architects. Why else would so many hours be spent in studio high on caffeine, souped up on ramen, developing the ability to solve design problems? (https://archinect.com/news/article/149990764/architecture-majors-work-the-hardest-in-college-study-reveals) Mentoring also requires the firms and the individuals doing the guiding to be proactive in the development of Young Architects.  Relationships are critical Murray says, offering “Mentoring is not something that you say, ‘oh its mentoring time’.  That’s not how it works. Mentoring is about long term relationships and nurturing someone.”

It helps to work for a firm that reviews performance through the lens of an individual’s goals. If performance isn’t up to par it seems logical that the issue would be dealt with immediately. The yearly ‘performance review’ done at Pfeiffer focuses on what each employee is seeking in their own career path. “We try to find what each person wants and help them get there,” Murray continues. That level of personalized guidance is not just limited to the conference room yearly talk. Julian-Lester recalled many times when she spoke to her mentors about her career path and goals while on the road. Murray sees this as part of how Emerging Professionals and Young Architects curate their career path. “There is a lot of talk about career when we are on the road or having dinner or at an event,” He adds.  “We talk not just during reviews. You have that time with someone. So pay attention to the size of the firm you go into that those opportunities (to meet outside the office) are there.”

Julian-Lester addressed some of the challenges in making those critical life-path decisions commenting, “In the first few years after school I just wanted to get as much experience as I could with different projects. There were economy issues. There were some jobs you had to get. But by the time I came to Pfeiffer I knew that I wanted to work on larger civic projects that would be long lasting.”

Firm culture plays a role in developing Young Architects, but another part of the equation is the style your mentor ascribes to. For Emerging Professional, green to the profession, a more hands-on approach like Julian-Lester’s first experience might be more useful than someone who mentors through ‘non-mentoring’.  Murray refers to his first mentorship encounter as more about trust. “I got out of college and worked for two architects of HL who were Dave Rinehart and Jack MacAllister who were two great mentors through ‘not mentoring’. They worked for Kahn. They came out of that culture. If you had any smarts and talent they trusted you to go ahead and do it.”

For the emerging professional, this means you need to show up with some skills and the ability to learn fast. Building your portfolio of hard skills such as software, drawing, and planning and soft skills like communication, body-language and contextual thinking in school will boost your ability to receive mentorship from Architects with this perspective. “It’s all about trust. If you sank you sank and if you swam you swam. I don’t set out to say I will mentor this person. There isn’t really a format that you go about mentoring somebody. I like to give them the opportunity to succeed.  Someone who takes advice and constantly comes to me and asks questions. Constant questions. How do I get better, how did you get to where you are? That kind of stuff.” This begs the question, if someone’s hard skills don’t showcase their design ability, or their soft skills don’t explain design thinking, how does an Emerging Professional or Young Architect work within the parameters of ‘non-mentorship’? The answer is not simple but relies on trust.

Through different styles of mentorship, Murray and Julian-Lester both touch on trust as a keystone to mentorship relationships. From the vantage point of an Emerging Professional, trust in oneself is also crucial. If you do sink on one project or task, the emerging professional must trust that if they want that opportunity again they will have to make it. Self-driven initiatives, competitions, drive and focus are all part of it. 

Julian-Lester knows this. “Early in my career I remember being frustrated a lot. It was mostly because I didn’t know how to do something or what the next steps should be. And that’s natural. That frustration pushes you to learn more. A lot of it is about absorbing. It’s not just being in front of the computer. But it’s trying to learn the technical issues, the materiality. Any little piece you can absorb. That is the building blocks.” 

Mentors from Professors to Senior Architects are fundamental in shaping all levels of the Design Professional’s career path. By actively seeking and growing those relationships, the network of mentors built over time will result in greater access to the skills necessary to achieve that career.