mentor and mentee
You need to do a lot of things to create a career you love: Focus on your goals, for example, and avoid getting distracted or derailed by other people’s preferences or ideas about what you should want to do. You have to build skills, update them, and remain flexible as opportunities arise and new industries develop. And you have to tap the insight and support of others with more experience—both those on your “personal board of directors,” something this column has covered before, and mentors at your place of work and in your field.
The idea of mentorship dates back to the ancient Greeks, who saw mentoring as a way to promote better leadership. A mentor was a wise elder who had “been there and done that,” and could share wisdom gained from his experience with a young protégé.
A mentor has remained a key ingredient in a long and rewarding career, but one that has gone somewhat missing in today’s work-from-home world. A good mentor-mentee relationship is built on real connection and regular interaction; ideally mentorships happen naturally, developing over a long period of time. In the once-normal, in-person work environment, mentor relationships often formed organically through the course of the day, such as while collaborating on a project, visiting a client face-to-face, or even chatting over lunch or around the coffee maker. Yes, genuine connection can happen in a remote world, but it’s harder to create. Without regular in-person meetings with more experienced workers, it can be very hard to find mentors—or even to realize what you’re missing by not having them.
The Great Resignation isn’t helping. A record 50.5 million Americans left their jobs in 2022, an increase from 2021, which was itself an unprecedented year of turnover, as this CNBC article reports (complete with some compelling graphs). Some of those leaving were experienced workers who took their mentoring skills home with them.
Mentors Matter
Make no mistake: mentors matter. They are a hugely important, often stealth, component of crafting a good career. A mentor may be a boss, recruiter or more experienced fellow employee. Mentors can give advice, highlight areas in which you need to develop, make valuable connections, and help you pivot to a new department or field. They can also guide you through difficult interpersonal relationships at the office, address concerns about tough situations, and share unbiased perspectives. Mentors at your company may even find opportunities for you within one of the firm’s overseas offices, if that’s what you seek.
Today’s mentor crisis may be hitting young people the hardest. At the beginning of any career, an on-site mentor can show you how to do specific features of your job. As Josh (not his real name), a recent college grad who went to work for a major consulting firm, discovered, many tasks are not best taught by Googling them. “When you’re a new starter, you learn through osmosis. You watch other people, sit next to them, ask lots of questions and get quick responses. When you have someone there to take you through each of those phases, the learning process is sped up,” says Josh.
Without that fast-paced, in-person assistance, you may feel like you’re floundering —and find yourself judged for it. Unfortunately for Josh, whose job began during lockdown, the first three crucial months of onboarding happened online. “At my six-month mark, I was told, ‘Hey, your progress doesn’t really seem like it’s been six months.’” His firm was telling him that he wasn’t where he should be after six months at the firm. Says Josh, “I was like, ‘Well, I haven’t really been here six months because no one was sitting next to me, showing me how to do stuff or bringing a fresh perspective and helping me think differently about the problem.’ It’s not that I can’t figure out things on my own. It’s that you don’t have a rapid response to questions, or a chance to brainstorm with people. And this job was fundamentally a client-facing job.”
Even though he got good mentoring later, his early months colored his experience and, he thinks, how other people in the firm saw him. “It’s really difficult to progress if you’re behind or what they perceive to be slow,” he says. He wound up leaving after 18 months and specifically chose a new job with a strong in-office culture.
University of Michigan-Dearborn professor of sociology Pamela Aronoson recently told Business Insider “What's really important here is that young adults are not getting the socialization to workplace norms, and they're also not getting mentoring,"
Find a Mentor, Wherever You Are
If your current job leaves you with too little opportunity to gain from others’ experience, you may want to do what Josh did—find a different job. Stay long enough to make sure you’ve learned from your experience, if you can. But if you feel under-appreciated and can tell that you’re not learning as quickly as you might, don’t take it personally. Instead, find a place that will let you interact and learn from others.
Some people are in jobs that lack on-site mentors even when they do go to the office. This is the case with a young communications professional working at a small foundation in Los Angeles. Because she’s a staff of one, she has to reach out to others and proactively build a network to gain guidance and ideas from those with more experience.
You can form mentor relationships even without an office culture that makes it easy to do so, but you will have to be more intentional about it. Look for opportunities to join a local branch of an industry association or a networking group that meets in-person. Look on LinkedIn and on your university’s alumni page for people who work in your field, then write and ask if you can take them for coffee. You absolutely can create real relationships by reaching out, finding someone with whom you click, and keeping in touch.
While mentoring is usually a long term relationship, there are some incredible substitutes.
Mentor Walks, an organization in Australia, NZ, Canada and Singapore offers periodic one hour walks with exceptional leaders open to having career conversations about any topic that interests you. Mentees get the opportunity to exchange knowledge with other aspiring women from diverse backgrounds. This is a low commitment, high impact approach to mentoring that provides clarity, confidence and connection.
If you’re a leader, you can support relationships among experienced and newer employees even if your firm is remote. One way is by creating a virtual or remote mentorship program. Because so many meetings happen by Zoom today, a long-distance or virtual mentor-mentee relationship may feel far more natural than it would have in the past. You can also create opportunities for team-building and collaboration, even if the day-to-day job is remote.
Be a Mentor
Being a mentor can be tremendously rewarding. Sharing what you’ve learned helps solidify it in your mind. It also reminds you of how much you have done and how far you’ve come. Reinforcing your own strengths and skills helps generate enthusiasm for work, giving you stamina to keep going. Mentoring is also a way of “paying back” the good fortune and opportunities you have had, which feels rewarding and valuable itself. For some people, sharing knowledge accumulated through a lifetime of work is one of the biggest joys of a long career.
If you meet a younger person through work who could use your guidance and support, offer to take them to coffee and hear about their goals. You can be a mentor through a formal organization, such as, in the U.S., the Small Business Administration’s SCORE program. You might mentor a student or recent grad through your college or university, or find younger professionals through an industry association. Even if you work for yourself, your experience is valuable to others.
