Practical Mentorship
If you've spent any time recently talking to higher-level judges, reading any articles about judging, or judging in any premiere level events, chances are that it hasn't been very long since the last time you heard the word "mentorship".

In a lot of ways, the growth of mentorship closely mirrors the growth of the DCI Judge program itself, and its spread represents one of the program's greatest strengths. Early on in the program's history, anyone with interest or skill was welcome to join, but early judges were often isolated and working on their own, with little to go on but their own instincts and tricks they picked up along the way. Over time, as the program grew, communities of judges started to form and judges gained opportunities to learn from each other, coordinated at the top by a growing group of senior and experienced judges.

Today, as the idea of active mentorship pushes past the senior levels and works its way throughout the entire program, we find ourselves at a somewhat awkward point, where the general ideas and ideals are often documented and communicated, but actual practical mentorship at the local level can still be hit and miss, and those ideals still haven't made it into practice in many places.

For many of you, this is true in your own judging communities. So how can you take part in bringing mentorship home?

A Simple Definition
Fortunately, mentorship, for all the attention paid to it, is not a complex concept, and can be summed up in a single question—"What are you doing to help improve the judges around you?"

The simplicity of this question is important. It doesn't refer to being a higher level, having judged more tournaments, being more experienced as a player, or any other such factors. It's very natural to think that mentorship works the way it does in other jobs, with only the most experienced and senior people appointed as mentors to pass their knowledge on. This notion is unfortunately exacerbated by the top-down way in which mentorship is being driven through the DCI.

In judging, though, this isn't the model that we seek to encourage. It's useful for more senior judges to share their thoughts with newer ones, but this is true at all levels. One of the great misconceptions about the way the judge levels work is that there's a certain level that you need to reach before you're ready to mentor other judges around you, when actually mentorship opportunities exist at every level. Even in the case where you are equally experienced as another judge, because everyone has their own perspectives on things, you still have something to offer.

There's no prerequisite other than having ideas to share with the judges around you, and figuring out the right ways to share what you have with those judges in an effective way.

Bidirectional
As important as receiving constructive feedback is to growth and improvement, hearing such feedback can be very difficult. It's important to keep that in mind when offering your thoughts to somebody. The most effective mentorship takes the form of two-way discussions rather than one-way lectures and recognition that there may be another side to the story or another way of looking at things. One of the most valuable things to internalize is the idea that just as you may be right, you might also be wrong, or your current view on things might be incomplete.

This isn't just lip-service to help with people's self-esteem, it also enhances the ability to share ideas and improve, for both people involved. If you simply tell somebody how something should be done, or that something that happened was wrong, not only do you make it harder for them to hear and accept your feedback, but you lose out on the opportunity to refine your own thinking and to possibly improve your own way of doing things.

Remembering to approach things this way can be challenging, but actually doing it is simple. Instead of making proclamations, ask questions. Don't just tell somebody that there's a different or better way to do something, ask them why they did things the way they did. Instead of telling them that they should consider a point of philosophy differently, ask them to explain their view on that philosophy. It may be that they haven't thought about it before, but even that realization is valuable in a way that isn't matched by just being told things. Also, if you have feedback or ideas to offer somebody, take the time to ask them whether they have feedback or ideas for you.

Do keep in mind, though, that just as there is a time and place for answering player questions in detail, there's a time and place for these discussions, and it's important to recognize when a discussion needs to be tabled for later, after the current round, or after the tournament has ended.

Staying Balanced
In just about any situation that involves giving feedback, there is a natural tendency to focus on the negatives—the things that need to improve, the things you would do differently, or the things that didn't go as well as you might have hoped. This is very understandable, as these types of events give easy discussion topics, and they do lead to valuable discussions.

Just as it's easier for people to accept feedback when the discussions are two-way, though, it's also easier to take constructive advice and criticisms when they're accompanied by reinforcement of the things that they do well. Furthermore, when trying out new ideas, the feedback that something is a good idea and worth continuing is just as valuable as feedback that suggests that a change might be worth considering. It's important to remember this when mentoring others—don't focus only on the negatives; take the time to consider the positive things that they do and make sure that they know that you noticed these things as well.

It's easy to feel obligated, when working with others judges and trying to find ways to help them improve, to feel like you have to come up with something to say no matter what. While it's useful to make gathering useful things to say a strong goal so that you aren't tempted to relax and let those opportunities pass, it's also important not to force things that aren't there. If you've put in the effort to observe and find things to discuss and nothing has come up, it's reasonable to tell them that, and not to force something that isn't there. Making up feedback solely for the purpose of having something to say may make you feel like you've been more successful, but doesn't actually provide meaningful value for the other person and can even detract from the overall lessons that they're learning. Be honest about what you see and what you don't see, and don't force yourself to see things that aren't really there.

Pairwise Mentoring
Some of the best opportunities for mentorship happen at local premiere events, where there is a staff of a few judges working together to run the event. Even for those who are experienced in the art of watching other judges and coming up with useful feedback for them, though, it can be challenging to do this for more than a few people at a time. This is even harder for those who haven't had a chance to practice this skill, and it's easy to get lost trying to keep tabs on everyone involved in a tournament and come up with something useful to share with them.

Additionally, there's a limit to what most people can notice when they're observing others in a passive mode. Some things will be instinctual enough for you to notice without having to put in active effort, but being an active observer rather than a passive one increases the breadth and quality of the things that you notice, because it forces you to notice more of the things that happen, and encourages you to put in the effort to actually think about those things.

Because of these factors, one of the most useful tactics in enabling effective mentorship is to narrow your focus, and to specifically target only a few people. At the largest professional level events, this is a natural side effect of the team system, where the staff is broken into smaller teams that have their own leads and work more directly with each other. At local events with a smaller staff, though, teams oftentimes don't make sense—there aren't enough people and there aren't enough logistical challenges to make a team breakdown useful. Yet, it still would be useful to narrow people's focus for terms of feedback and mentorship.

A good intermediate solution to this is pairwise mentorship, which takes advantage of the idea of shadowing on a smaller scale. Rather than have every judge go off and work on their own, group judges up into pairs. While each judge is still working independently and making sure that everything necessary gets done, an emphasis is placed on paying attention to each other, and to shadow each other as you handle player calls or other tasks. This keeps the tournament staff logistically nimble and unencumbered with too much logistical overhead, while still providing a way to focus judges on specific people to gather active feedback on. Because there isn't an explicit lead, this structure also facilitates mentorship that works in both directions, encouraging the two-way conversations that lead to more effective growth.

This technique can work well for most pairings of judges, though as always, it can be useful to pair less experienced judges with more experienced ones so that somebody in the pair can help drive the process and given a model for how it works. Finding pairs where one judge has something specific to offer that the other one needs or wants can also increase the usefulness of this system.

Solo Situations
All of this is well and good when dealing with tournaments that have a staff of more than one person, but what about those small local and store tournaments that only involve a single judge?

Unfortunately, in some of these cases, there really isn't much to be done, because there simply isn't access to people who have the context to think about judging. What can happen, however, is to try and take advantage of what opportunities you might have for other judges to show up. This is something that the senior judges in an area often either do themselves, or try and help coordinate amongst the judges in their area.

Maybe the store owner or employees also know something about judging and help watch for feedback during the tournament. Maybe you're one of several judges who rotates through tournaments at that location and you can trade off with the other judges to occasionally show up at tournaments that you aren't running so that you can watch and offer feedback to the others. Perhaps some local judges occasionally show up to play in your tournaments and can give you a perspective on the things you do from the player's side of things (in this case, be very careful not to do this during the event, where it's important for there to be a clean separation between players and staff—wait until afterward to have these discussions).

Just as active feedback can be more effective than passive feedback, actively putting in the effort to try and increase the opportunities to mentor can be surprisingly more effective than passively waiting for those chances to occur on their own.

Wrapping Up
Thinking about judge mentorship as a traditional mentorship suggests a grand and formal process, when in actuality it can happen on a small scale, informally, and without too much additional effort or preparation. All that is necessary for a judge to take part is a realization they have something useful to offer to other judges, an understanding of effective ways to provide this advice, and the desire to improve the judges around them for the strength of the program, their tournaments, and their local community. It's not as intimidating as it can sound when talked about at a high level, it doesn't take much additional effort, and the benefits of learning from the discussions you have and the mentorship that you're receive in return are well worth it.

Next week: Johanna Virtanen with her monthly look at the world of DCI judging.

Next month: As much as we like to focus on the always improving quality of judges across the DCI, the reality is that not every judge is necessarily up to the level that we might want them to be at, and in some cases, the situation isn't improving. This seems inevitable given the volunteer nature of the program, but for the sake of the player experience and the overall integrity of the DCI, it's important not to merely accept this. How do we deal with judges who aren't heading in the right direction and help them to achieve more?

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Nicholas J. Fang
DCI Certified Level 3 Judge—Redmond, WA
mtgjudge@gmail.com
Agbaar and Ag|Work on EFnet's #mtgjudge