Survey says…?

[Spoiler Alert: we don’t yet have the data from the surveys referenced in this post’s title, so Family Feud devotees expecting to instantly hear a “ding!” and see an answer pop up are likely to be disappointed.]

The honeymoon is officially over for the first bunch of mentoring matches we made last fall. That’s no cause for alarm, though—these matches are only a few months old, but they’re built to last.

We celebrate a match’s successful completion of their first four months by bringing both committed partners together for a face-to-face meeting with a member of the program staff. We circle up and give everyone a chance to share from their experience. We verify that everyone’s contact info is up-to-date, make sure we have a workable list of goals on paper, and ask both partners to complete a survey.

I had the pleasure some years ago of making the acquaintance of John Harris, a highly regarded expert in mentoring evaluation. John is the lead author of a couple of surveys that are terrific diagnostic tools for programs interested in producing and documenting high quality matches.

John is the person who first introduced me to the phenomenon of the mentoring match honeymoon. It makes sense, really. Ask the sorts of questions included in the surveys during the “getting-to-know-you” phase of a relationship, and you’re likely to get results that are somewhat skewed, especially from youths. Depending on a young person’s age and temperament, those first few weeks and months might be spent toward either extreme of what we might call the “relationship reality” scale.

At one end of this scale is the “Ohmygosh this is SO amazing! It’s outside the realm of possibility that my mentor could ever do anything wrong” bunch. At the other end is the “Are you kidding me? We’re just gonna sit here and talk for an hour?!? This is NOT what I signed up for” crowd. Once the match matures a bit and its members build some common experience, the responses tend to settle in somewhere between the extremes.

That’s what I’ve observed while conducting several of these four month checkups recently. The blindfolds and rose-colored glasses are off, and I’m pleased to find a lot of teens and adults willing and able to give meaningful (and generally good) assessments of where things stand. They laugh together as they recall funny incidents, complete each other’s sentences, embarrass one another with the insider information they’ve learned. No, they’re not newlyweds, but they are committed partners.

Well, as promised at the outset, I don’t have hard match relationship quality data for you right now. It’s in the realm of possibility that the surveys will uncover a different story than the one the mentors and teens have verbalized to us. We might get a smattering of “Where did that come from?!?” answers à la Family Feud, but I certainly don’t expect we’ll learn that the matches we think are successful are actually disasters. Stay tuned….