The complete guide to editorial co-mentoring

Based on openness and shared exploration, co-mentoring is a great way to gain new perspectives and connect with others in your field. To get the best from editorial co-mentoring, you need to plan for it both practically and emotionally.

A long time ago, I wrote a post on The Edit Better Blog about co-mentoring. When I say a long time, I mean a long time: 11 years, to be precise. The post was speculative – I hadn’t actually tried co-mentoring but it seemed like a good idea. My dear edibuddy (editor buddy) Vanessa Plaister of edi-tor.com and I kept making plans to try it, but we never quite managed to coincide.

The thought languished, seemingly forever to remain a wouldn’t-it-be-interesting-if...

But it’s never too late to pursue a good idea, so I was thrilled when fellow business editor Lisa de Caux of LdC Editorial got in touch earlier this year to ask whether she could feature my post in a video on mentoring she was preparing for her series The Editorial Cuppa.

Long story short: I asked Lisa if she fancied giving co-mentoring a go, she said yes and it was a roaring success.

Co-mentoring can be an enormously powerful tool in your learning, development and networking. But there is little in the way of an established protocol, and the potential pitfalls are many and varied. What topics will you discuss? How long will you devote to the exercise? Will you swap actual completed work? Will you cover non-editorial topics, such as business practices? Can you trust the other person to keep the experience confidential? Are you each prepared emotionally for the experience?

In this post I’m going to share with you:

• What co-mentoring is
• What to look for in a co-mentor
• How to actually find a co-mentor
• How to decide the parameters for your co-mentoring
• Lisa’s and my experience of co-mentoring
• What Lisa and I got out of co-mentoring
• How to be an effective editorial co-mentor

What is co-mentoring?

Co-mentoring is an arrangement between two or more professionals to provide feedback on each other’s working practices. The co-mentors should be roughly equal in what they can contribute to the partnership, perhaps being at similar stages in their career or having different but complementary skills. There should be no obvious hierarchy between them, and each should be eager to learn from the other.

The reciprocity of the relationship is crucial. As Avil Beckford of The Invisible Mentor says, ‘Your professional relationship lifts you up, and both benefit from the partnering.’

I should be clear that neither Lisa nor I have mentoring training, although I have been an informal mentor in the past. Lisa supported her team as a manager in her previous career and is now a welcoming shepherd of her local Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading group in Manchester.

But this is kind of the point: co-mentoring doesn’t require you to be a skilled sage, poised with fingers steepled to dispense eternal wisdom. What you need is open-mindedness and a willingness to learn through exploration.

What to look for in a co-mentor

Lisa’s and my choice of each other as co-mentors was serendipitous rather than strategic. Although we had formed good general impressions of each other, we hadn’t interacted directly before. As you read above, the suggestion of being co-mentors was a spur-of-the-moment thing.

For us this worked out really well. Our skillsets and experience complemented each other: although I had been an editor longer than Lisa, she had other experience coming from a previous career as a chartered accountant, and I was impressed by the clearly client-centric approach she demonstrated in her social media posts.

On her reasons for entering into the partnership, Lisa says:

I read Hazel’s blogs as I embarked on my career change, so I’d always known her as a respected voice in the editorial community. And I’m a sucker for CPD. I’d got in touch to research an episode answering a question about mentoring for The Editorial Cuppa, and I was so chuffed when Hazel offered an unexpected, and very welcome, opportunity to look after my own CPD.

I believe that with eagerness to learn, almost any two people in related fields can be effective co-mentors. But you may also want to reflect on your criteria for choosing a co-mentor, to maximize what you get out of the experience.

There are two main areas to think about: skills and experience, and attitude and values.

Skills and experience

When it comes to skills and experience, broadly speaking I reckon there are two main models of co-mentoring:

• Skill sharing: You and your co-mentor have similar skills and experience that you want to share.
• Skill swap: You and your co-mentor have different (but related) skills and experience, where each values the other’s expertise.

It’s a good idea to decide which model you’re interested in so you can identify an appropriate partner.

Attitude and values

Skills and experience are important, but in my view attitude and values are even more so when it comes to co-mentoring. You will be giving your partner a window into your editorial practices (perhaps in a way you’ve never done before) and asking for a critique. That can make you vulnerable, and it’s vital to have a partner who will respect and share that vulnerability.

Some characteristics that might suggest a helpful attitude in a co-mentor are:

• Open-mindedness
• Eagerness to learn
• Humility
• Kindness and consideration for others
• Dedication to their career

Pay attention to the values your co-mentor demonstrates publicly, to assess whether their values are likely to harmonize with your own.

How to find a co-mentor

But how do you actually find a co-mentor who meets your criteria?

In a word, networking.

I was comfortable suggesting co-mentoring with Lisa having followed her on LinkedIn. So, one way to find a co-mentor is to follow and interact with others on public social media. You may find that you naturally click with someone, or you can reach out to them more formally to propose a chat (you might not want to jump straight to suggesting co-mentoring).

There are also numerous private networking groups you can join (e.g. editors’ groups on Facebook or LinkedIn). In this case you’ll already have a shared interest with the others in the group, which may give you a springboard for suggesting a collaboration.

Membership organizations can be really helpful sources of networking opportunities. Some (such as the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading) have private members’ forums where you can get to know others who might be interested in co-mentoring.

Other possibilities include fellow volunteers (e.g. on councils or in membership organizations) and other freelancers who work for your clients (e.g. if your client has a shared chat for their freelancers, you may get to know others working for them).

Essentially, just interact with relevant others and see if you are drawn to anybody in particular. Perhaps they will be drawn to you too!

Remember that just as you will be checking out potential co-mentors, they need to check you out too. Make sure you interact (don’t just watch or lurk) so as to provide others with evidence of your professionalism and decency. That will make it easier for them to choose you as a co-mentor.

Deciding the parameters for your editorial co-mentoring

Once we’d agreed we were both interested in co-mentoring in principle, Lisa and I began with a chat via Zoom. Our goal was to talk through how a co-mentoring partnership might work and discuss what we both wanted to get out of it.

Given that we hadn’t corresponded directly before, this was a particularly important step to gauge whether we felt comfortable with each other and get to know each other’s priorities. But I’d recommend some sort of preliminary chat, however well you and your potential co-mentor know each other. It’s important to establish ground rules and agree in a practical sense what the co-mentoring partnership will involve.

From our initial discussion, Lisa and I began by confirming we’d follow the idea in my original blog post: we’d swap pieces of work and share our reflections on them. However, co-mentoring can also be more general, where you discuss business practices, personal challenges or indeed anything you like.

After agreeing the basic framework, we then agreed the following terms of reference:

• We’d swap around 5,000 words of our editing of business content
• We wouldn’t include any references in the 5,000 words, as we were more interested in general reflections than detailed technical feedback
• We’d aim to swap work where there was a moderate level of editing – i.e. where there was some rewriting and maybe some movement of text, but nothing too drastic (and not developmental editing)
• We agreed that we’d keep our specific reflections confidential but that we were both happy to share general reflections on social media and to be tagged in the other’s posts (and I mooted the idea of this blog post, which Lisa generously endorsed)
• We’d be relaxed about the timescale – we did agree a deadline to share our samples and then a deadline for the feedback, but we were both clear that we felt we’d get the most out of the co-mentoring if we didn’t rush it
• We were open to feedback – whatever insights the other had, we wanted to hear!

We summarized these points by email and then swapped more messages as further ideas occurred to us. Specifically:

• We reduced the word count to around 4,000 and agreed to share our respective style sheets for the editing samples we were swapping
• We clarified that the projects would be from the past 12 months, to ensure we’d be getting feedback on our current working practices

In hindsight, it was enormously valuable that we didn’t rush the process and so left space for it to evolve. Sharing our style sheets turned out to be one of the most valuable aspects of the collaboration for me, and a source of great discussions later.

What we didn’t do at this stage was to decide the format our feedback would take. We later settled on another Zoom call with no written feedback. But it would be a good idea to discuss potential feedback formats at your initial meeting, to ensure you and your co-mentor have similar expectations.

The last (vitally important) set-up stage was to get permission from our respective clients to use their projects for co-mentoring. Happily, both clients immediately said yes.

Our experience of editorial co-mentoring

After sharing our samples, we went quiet (about the co-mentoring at least!). We’d agreed to a deadline a couple of months away, and during that time we each dug through each other’s samples. I made notes both within Lisa’s sample edit and on her style sheet.

Then, when we were ready, we had our second Zoom call.

Giving our co-mentoring feedback via Zoom worked really well for us. We could have shared detailed feedback on each other’s documents instead of or as well as the call. However, as the co-mentoring process evolved, I think we both realized that what we primarily wanted from the partnership was to bounce ideas off each other. Although we did talk about some specifics of our editing practices and use of style sheets, we weren’t so interested in getting detailed technical feedback on the minutiae of our editing decisions.

That distinction between detailed and general feedback is key. It’s crucial for the co-mentors to understand what each other are looking for, whether that’s big-picture feedback, a technical critique of their edits or both.

What we got out of editorial co-mentoring

My main reflection: context is vital

My main reflection was how much the process underlined the importance of the client’s brief and other communications. Very often, while I was going through Lisa’s sample and style sheet, I found myself thinking ‘But what would the client want?’ In other words, I found myself unable to tell what I would have done in Lisa’s place because I didn’t have any sense at all of the client’s requirements.

(To be clear: I’m not in any way questioning the editorial decisions Lisa took! I’m just saying that without knowledge of her client’s preferences, I felt insufficiently equipped to judge what I would have done in her place.)

In hindsight it perhaps seems obvious that we should have shared our clients’ briefs and style guides (note that a style guide is not the same thing as a style sheet, as I’ve explained). But even then, a brief and style guide can’t substitute for days, months or years of back and forth with the client. This communication is crucial in building up a nuanced picture of what our clients do and don’t want from their editors and proofreaders.

For me, this sense of being unmoored from the client’s expectations was an incredibly powerful reminder of the importance of the client–editor relationship (as I’ve written about in my AI manifesto). It was validating, in a way, to look at a piece of text and not know what I should do. I’m not saying I didn’t have options – I could identify many different possible edits, and I could certainly have delivered a high-quality professional edit had I needed to. It’s just that, ideally, I would have wanted to understand the client’s preferences more deeply before deciding which of the various editing options to choose.

The experience underlined for me how we human editors make our decisions with an understanding of context. We don’t impose our personal preferences and we don’t blindly apply rules. We help our clients communicate, and to do that we need to communicate with our clients.

Lisa’s main reflection: evolution in practice

I probably would have chosen ‘context’ as my word… Hazel beat me to it though, so that encouraged me to think about our exercise from a different perspective. For both of us, our immediate reaction to the end of the exercise was to reflect on it – it clearly gave us plenty to think about!

Our co-mentoring exercise started from a place of real spontaneity, and we agreed our terms of reference at our first meeting. We developed our terms of reference as we thought about practical implications. The fact that we started from a place of clarity, consideration of how we’d work together, and willingness to be flexible indicated to me that we had very similar mindsets, and that this was going to be a cracking exercise. Given the (usually unspoken) emotional commitment for both parties, it’s so important to be comfortable with your co-mentor.

We really made sure that we got the most out of the exercise by keeping it evolving constantly and double-checking that we were both still in a good place together. We course corrected when we moved to 4,000 words and included our style sheets. This made all the difference to the value we got!

My practice has evolved as a result of this exercise.

And this has demonstrated my business’s evolution too. When I was contemplating my career change in 2016, I remember reading Hazel’s blogs as part of orienting myself in the editorial space. So it’s a big deal for me that my business has evolved so that I can co-mentor with a respected and established editor like Hazel and be confident that I will add value to the process.

Co-mentoring can support your evolution as an editor in more than one way, and I thoroughly recommend it. Hazel’s top tips about finding a co-mentor (below) are good ones, and I’d add that it’s important to be open to unexpected opportunities.

Going forward: further collaboration

We both found the co-mentoring experience hugely valuable – and fun too! It was great to have the opportunity to get to know Lisa better. And indeed the networking value of co-mentoring shouldn’t be underestimated. Once you’ve seen someone’s work in detail, you may feel confident referring clients to them.

Lisa and I also plan to continue exchanging ideas, but concentrating on our business practices rather than our editorial work. This wasn’t something either of us planned when we were first considering co-mentoring, but it felt like a natural progression from our discussions.

Have you tried co-mentoring? What did you get from the experience? Would you recommend it to others? What cautions and recommendations would you share? Let me know in the comments.