Balancing technology and empathy in mentorship

- Imagine this. Your boss is clearly overwhelmed by their growing team and is using AI-powered tools to track the progress of their mentees, including you. It beautifully shows which team members are likely to need more handholding based on their performance. Impressive, right? Hmm, not really. When it is time for the difficult conversations, there are a bunch of data points, but they're missing all of the nuance and backstory. They're missing empathy, the human touch that no algorithm can replicate. In my research on high achievers, I got to interview Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. Bob Lefkowitz. He shared a story from his medical residency. Given a bunch of medical facts, his boss, the senior physician, encouraged him to tell the story and come up with a diagnosis. Dr. Lefkowitz did that. Then his boss said, "But what if the story was different?" Dr. Lefkowitz countered with, "The facts are the facts, the story can't change." Oh, is Dr. Lefkowitz wrong? His boss showed him that by highlighting certain facts and paying less attention to others, the story and diagnosis could be totally different. So getting the story right is pivotal. Dr. Kathy Kram identified two main roles of a mentor. The first is to help with the career functions, such as offering challenging assignments, exposure, and career guidance. The second are the psychosocial factors, such as offering acceptance, confirmation, and cheering them on. The second part should be approached with thoughtfulness and empathy. AI has the power to revolutionize how we mentor. We can get data, insights and predictive analytics instantly to help guide our advice and decisions. While AI can streamline the process, it cannot replace the essential human element of empathy. The U.S. Surgeon General reported that loneliness is a huge problem. People crave connection. That's one of the issues that made the pandemic so difficult, the isolation. Having personalized conversations helps build the foundation of mentoring, which is based so much on psychological safety and trust. I'm not saying you shouldn't use AI, I'm just stating that you should use it to understand your mentee's needs, but balance that by having vulnerable conversations and responding to their unique needs with something you know will work based on your own experience, not what AI spits out. By all means, use AI to gather data, but interpret that data with human insights. If AI is telling you a mentee is not meeting milestones, balance that with a conversation to understand why. Encourage the mentee to use digital tools to help with scheduling, planning, and reminders. But emotionally intelligent conversations should never be replaced by a digital tool.