How To Supercharge Your Career With the Help of a Mentor ?
A good mentor offers an empathetic ear, encouraging words, and a wealth of professional knowledge, experience, and expertise. They can advise you, challenge you, and connect you with development opportunities to reach your goals.
In short, having a good mentor in your corner can boost your confidence and accelerate your career. But where do you find one, and how do you cultivate a positive and mutually beneficial mentoring relationship?
In this course, you’ll first discover what mentoring is and how a great mentor can vault your career to the next level. You’ll then learn how to find a mentor and adopt the attitudes and behaviours you need to be a model mentee.
“Start Course” —when you’re ready to begin.
What Is Mentoring?
Someone to Lean On
Imagine that you’re a young professional. You’ve been working and developing your skills in an entry-level position for the past year, but you hope to work your way up in the company. You have the drive and work ethic, but you don’t yet have the experience or know-how to make it happen. What should you do?
Or, consider another scenario. This time you’re a midlevel associate. You’re confident in your abilities and consistently produce results for the company. Still, you feel like you’ve plateaued. Frankly, you’re feeling stuck—even stagnant. How do you break through?
Both of the professionals in these scenarios could benefit from the guidance of a good mentor. Mentoring is a powerful resource for both new and seasoned employees alike.
What Is Mentoring?
A mentor is a more senior, successful, or skilled professional who regularly provides guidance and gives you advice based on their own experience and expertise.
Mentoring is a supportive and ongoing relationship—it is not a onetime meeting. A mentor is invested in helping a mentee fulfill their personal or professional potential over several weeks, months, or even years. Mentors listen to their mentee’s goals and challenges, offer strategies or share lessons that they’ve learned, give feedback, advocate for their mentee, and connect their mentee with resources that may benefit them.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Mentor?
Having a great mentor can supercharge your career. Rather than learning the hard way, you can learn from your mentor’s years of experience, mistakes, and successes. That can help you advance personally or professionally much faster than you would on your own. Check out five other benefits of having a mentor below:
What Are the Benefits of Having a Mentor?
Having a great mentor can supercharge your career. Rather than learning the hard way, you can learn from your mentor’s years of experience, mistakes, and successes. That can help you advance personally or professionally much faster than you would on your own. Check out five other benefits of having a mentor below:
Mentors are valuable resources for career development. However, they can’t make decisions or do the work for you.
Limitations of Mentors
Setting the Right Expectations
A mentor can do a lot for you and your career—but they also have their limitations. A mentor is not a therapist or your best friend. They can help you brainstorm strategies to handle a difficult situation, but they are not there to listen to you vent or complain. Maintain professional boundaries, and remember that mentoring is a partnership. Mentors can share their experiences and offer advice—but they can’t make decisions or do the work for you.
Can a Mentor Help With This?
Explore how a mentor can (and can’t!) help your career by completing the following sorting activity. Drag and drop each statement into the correct category.
Can a Mentor Help With This?
Explore how a mentor can (and can’t!) help your career by completing the following sorting activity. Drag and drop each statement into the correct category.
How Do I Find a Mentor?
How to Find a Mentor
As beneficial as mentoring is, finding a mentor can be easier said than done. Where do you even begin? How do you reach out? Follow these four steps to get started.
Step 1
Identify Your Goals
First, to find the right mentor, you need to have a clear direction. Identify your professional goals as well as your goals for mentorship. Ask yourself the following questions:
Be specific. Getting clarity on your mentoring goals will narrow your pool of potential mentors and tell you whom to look for.
Step 2
Comb Your Network
The next step is to comb through your network to find someone who matches your career goals. Ask yourself the following prompts:
It will be much easier to find a mentor through a personal connection than a stranger. So, start by considering the people you work with—both in and outside your department.
If you can’t find a prospective mentor in these places, then move on to contacts who work outside of your company. A mentor can be anyone who has knowledge and experience that might benefit you. Look for people who share similar goals or have taken a path that you hope to follow.
Step 3
Make the Request
Once you’ve identified a prospective mentor, it’s time to approach them and make the request. Set up a meeting with this person—ideally, in person. If you can’t meet in person, then meet over a phone call or video chat.
Prepare your thoughts and notes ahead of time so that you can cover these main points in your meeting:
Be clear and direct when you make the ask. For example, you might say, “Would you be willing to mentor me?”
Step 4
Reach an Agreement
Finally, if the other person agrees to be your mentor, then the two of you should discuss and decide on the details. Reach a general agreement about the frequency and duration of your mentoring sessions. Also, how long will your mentoring relationship last? Will it end after you reach a particular goal? Or, will it last until the end of the quarter or the end of the year? Setting clear expectations will help you avoid confusion or resentment caused by miscommunications or unmet expectations.
Summary
Finding a great mentor may take some digging, but the benefits are worth the effort. Start by defining your career goals and then reviewing your professional network to identify who might be a good match. Set up an in-person meeting with your prospective mentor and be direct when making the ask. Lastly, don’t forget to set expectations and reach an agreement on how often you should meet for mentoring sessions.
What If I Don’t Have Anyone in My Network?
Some employees may find that they don’t have any personal connections with people who would be a good mentor for them. This situation is especially likely for young professionals or employees who are new to their industry, job, or career.
So, what should you do? Try talking to your human resources representative to see if your company offers mentorship programs or ask for their advice. Also, work on expanding your professional network by getting more involved at work, volunteering for special projects, and attending networking events or joining a professional organization. You might even ask to job shadow employees you look up to as a way to learn from them and establish new relationships.
A Checklist for Determining the Right Fit
Just because you want to find a mentor doesn’t mean that anybody will do. Mentoring relationships are a commitment. The mentor and the mentee need to be a good match for the relationship to be successful. Use this checklist to help you tell if a prospective mentor is the right fit:
Finding the right mentor is just the first step
Attitudes and Habits of Effective Mentees
Maintaining a Positive Mentoring Relationship
A great mentor is one of the most powerful resources you can have to advance your career. However, like most opportunities, mentoring is what you make of it. A mentor is not a miracle worker. Even the best mentors can’t help if you aren’t willing to put in the work. The wrong attitude can quickly cut your development—and your mentoring relationship—short.
So, how can you make the most of your mentoring sessions? And what can you do to maintain a positive relationship with your mentor? In this lesson, you’ll discover the answers to these questions by exploring what it takes to be a model mentee. Learn what role a mentee serves in a mentoring relationship followed by what attitudes and behaviours make you the kind of mentee that your mentor loves to work with.
What’s the Role of the Mentee?
Mentees so often focus on what a mentor can do for them that they overlook what they can do for their mentor and themselves. A mentoring relationship is not one-sided. Ideally, the mentoring relationship is collaborative, dynamic, and reciprocal.
The mentee plays an active role in steering the direction of mentoring conversations. Mentees set the agenda, ask questions, complete assignments, and identify goals or pain points. They translate their mentor’s advice into action.
Attitudes of a Model Mentee
Adopting the right attitude is the first step to becoming an exceptional mentee. The right attitude will make you more receptive to the advice or feedback that your mentor has to offer. Also, it will help you earn the reputation as someone who’s enjoyable to work with, which is important for persuading your mentor to invest their time and energy into meeting with you regularly. Here’s a checklist of attitudes you should cultivate as a model mentee:
How Would You Feel?
Remember that your mentor is volunteering their valuable time and energy to meet with you and offer their advice. They likely have a busy schedule and a host of other priorities that they’re balancing simultaneously. Try to put yourself in your mentor’s shoes. How would you feel in the following scenarios?
6 Habits of a Model Mentee
Let’s expand on this idea further. Beyond adopting the right attitude, what else can you do to foster a positive mentoring relationship? How can you make your mentor’s role easier and maximize your mentoring time?
Habit 1
Set Expectations and Respect Boundaries
Great mentees set expectations and respect the boundaries of their mentors. You and your mentor need to arrive at a shared understanding of what mentoring entails and when you will meet. Initiate this conversation with your mentor by saying, “I’d like to talk about expectations to make sure that we’re on the same page about what’s involved in mentoring.”
Then, follow these steps:
Once expectations and boundaries are set, adhere to them. Don’t call, email, or text your mentor outside of agreed-upon hours. Keep your expectations realistic and respectful of your mentor’s other priorities.
Habit 2
Make Scheduling Easy
Your mentor likely has a busy schedule, so make scheduling easy for them. Meet with your mentor on their terms. If it’s easier for them to meet at the coffee shop by their house—then do it. If Fridays are best for your mentor, then shift your schedule to accommodate them. Be flexible with scheduling, and do the organization and coordination work for them. Create and send detailed meeting invitations that highlight the who, what, when, where, and why of your meetings.
Habit 3
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Arrive Prepared
Always come to mentoring sessions prepared. Never arrive at a mentoring session without having prepared your thoughts and notes ahead of time. That includes:
Collecting your thoughts in advance will help your mentoring sessions be more structured and run more smoothly. Doing some prep work also shows your mentor that you respect and value their time.
Habit 4
Take Notes
Also, take notes during your mentoring sessions. Don’t ask the same question twice or make your mentor repeat their advice. Taking notes is a great way to keep track of what you cover in your mentoring sessions. You can also use these notes to recap what you and your mentor discussed during your previous session at the beginning of each new meeting.
Habit 5
Accept Challenges and Feedback
Another critical habit is to accept new challenges, ideas, and feedback. The point of mentoring is to advance your career and develop yourself personally or professionally. Since growth often comes out of conflict, be ready to take creative risks, step outside of your comfort zone, or try something that’s beyond your skills or experience level. Actively seek constructive feedback from your mentor—and accept feedback with enthusiasm and appreciation. Don’t get defensive or dismiss your mentor’s advice.
Habit 6
Take Action
The final habit is to take action. Your mentor’s feedback, advice, and guidance won’t be useful if it goes in one ear and out the other. You need to put what you learn into practice. Try your mentor’s suggestions, change your behavior, and turn ideas into action.
Then, ask yourself:
Share your responses to these questions with your mentor. It can be a great learning opportunity for you both.
Managing Up
Many of these best practices revolve around a common theme or idea called managing up. Managing up means taking ownership of the mentoring relationship. In other words, the mentee manages their mentor. You do this by organizing and scheduling mentoring sessions, setting meeting agendas, communicating what you need from your mentor, asking questions, completing assignments, and preparing reflections, notes, or status updates to share with them. Managing up is about making your mentor’s job easier, which, in turn, makes it easier for your mentor to help and focus on you.
Check Your Understanding
Summary
Mentees must play an active role in the mentoring relationship for it to be meaningful and effective. Take the initiative by organizing your mentoring sessions and setting each session’s agenda. Communicate what you need from your mentor, and arrive at mentoring sessions prepared with questions, progress updates, and notes. Also, be ready to embrace new challenges and constructive feedback from your mentor. An open mind, a little appreciation, and plenty of enthusiasm can help your mentoring relationship go a long way.
Add value. Your mentor has their own reasons for mentoring you. They may be hoping to hone their interpersonal skills, fill a business need, enhance their job satisfaction, or gain recognition from their peers. How can you make the mentoring relationship valuable for them? Whether it’s talking your mentor up to peers or offering respectful feedback on their mentoring techniques, look for ways that you can add value for your mentor, too.
Common Mentoring Challenges
Avoiding Potential Pitfalls
Even the best mentoring relationships can encounter challenges. Communication breakdowns, misaligned expectations, and incompatibility are just a few obstacles that can threaten the success of a budding mentor-mentee relationship. So, how can you avoid these potential pitfalls?
Common Challenges in a Mentoring Relationship
Many of the challenges that threaten a burgeoning mentoring relationship’s success are rooted in a single cause: a lack of shared understanding. That may include the lack of knowledge about what mentoring is and what it is not, how it works or what it involves, or the lack of understanding about what each person’s role should be or what to expect from a mentor and mentee.
Five challenges that may result are:
The following sections will outline each of these five challenges, along with strategies to avoid or overcome them.
The Problem
The first challenge is the lack of structure or focus. New mentees may wonder, “What should we talk about?” or “What do I say?” They may over-rely on their mentor to facilitate mentoring sessions. However, remember that it’s your responsibility to drive the conversation. So, what’s the solution?
Solution #1: Clarify Goals
Successful mentoring sessions have clear objectives. Ask yourself, “What are my broader career development goals?” Then, break those goals down into smaller topics, skills, or challenges you can address with your mentor. What do you hope to achieve or take away by the end of each mentoring session?
Remember that the goals can be revisited later—they don’t have to be absolute or fixed. You might even focus the first few mentoring sessions on discovering interests and setting goals in collaboration with your mentor. Consider these prompts:
Solution #2: Prepare Meeting Topics and Questions
Mentees should also reflect on and prepare topics to address with mentors in advance. Here are a few places to look for inspiration:
Talk About Recent or Upcoming Work Situations
Reflect on what’s happened at work since you last saw your mentor. What tricky situations came up? What questions or challenges did you face at work? Also, are there any upcoming projects that are producing feelings of anxiety or doubt? Discuss any specific work situations and resulting questions with your mentor. For example, you might ask, “I pitched to a client and didn’t get the bid. Can we discuss what I can do differently next time?’
Tap into Mentors’ Stories
Examine your mentor’s work, accomplishments, and experience. What would you like to learn more about? Ask mentors to share stories about how they recovered from an early failure, how they gained the courage to take a career risk, what attitudes and early decisions were instrumental to their success, and so on. Pretend like you’re interviewing your mentor. What questions and information would be useful to an aspiring professional?
Ask for Your Mentor’s Perspective
You might also ask your mentor for outside perspective or feedback. For example, you might ask for them to weigh in with their thoughts on a decision, ask what they’d identify as your skill gaps, or even ask how others view you in the organization.
Discuss Skills and Strategies
Also, don’t forget to tell mentors about the skills you want to build or ask them to share any strategies they have that will help you overcome specific challenges. For example, you might ask to practice a presentation with your mentor, or you might ask about best practices for managing up and sideways.
Send your mentor a meeting agenda. That way, they can also collect their thoughts and prepare resources, questions, or exercises before you meet.
The Problem
Unmet expectations in a mentoring relationship can lead to anger and resentment. Mentees may feel wronged by a mentor who doesn’t live up to their expectations of who a mentor should be and what results they can expect from their mentoring sessions. Mentors may also feel frustrated if mentoring takes up more of their time than they expected—or disappointed when they had higher expectations of their mentees.
The Solution
That’s why it’s so important to set clear expectations for the mentoring relationship up front. Spend your first mentoring session establishing ground rules and creating a mentoring “contract” or agreement. Be open and honest when describing what you expect from the mentoring relationship and be direct when setting boundaries and communicating what you can and cannot deliver. Here are a few expectations mentees and mentors should address in their agreements:
What does a successful mentoring relationship look like? Have both the mentee and mentor describe in detail how they envision a successful mentoring relationship. Paint a picture, tell a story—the more detail, the better. That will help you both identify any misaligned expectations.
The Problem
The third challenge is the lack of commitment. Mentoring requires 100% commitment from both the mentee and mentor alike. Mentees cannot progress if mentors aren’t investing the necessary time and energy to meet regularly, provide guidance, and be generous with their experience and knowledge. Mentors cannot help mentees who don’t prepare, show up, or put in the work.
The Solution
The best way to overcome a lack of commitment on either side is to address the issue directly. Have an honest conversation with the other person. Avoid accusing or blaming them. Instead, describe the behaviours that indicate a lack of commitment as objectively as possible, and then explain how it impacts you. Use “I” statements. Finally, ask the other party for their point of view before discussing next steps or solutions.
For example:
A Mentor Might Say
A mentor might say, “Last week, I had prepared extensively for our mentoring session, and I was surprised when an hour had passed, and I hadn’t heard from you. It felt like I had wasted my time, and now I’m struggling to trust your commitment. What happened?”
A Mentee Might Say
Or, a mentee might say, “Lately I’ve noticed that you’ve been responding with one-word answers. I know how busy you are, so I’ve been trying not to bother you. But at the same time, I’m really struggling with X, Y, and Z and could use more help. I wanted to talk to you about it and see if there’s something we can do to get me the support I need–while also respecting your time. What do you think is the best way to move forward?”
If the problem persists after you’ve talked to the other party repeatedly, then you may need to escalate the issue by having a frank discussion about whether the mentoring relationship is working and can continue.
Sometimes, the lack of commitment is unintentional. A mentor or mentee may be feeling stressed or dealing with an issue that you have no idea about. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Don’t assume that they’re trying to avoid you. Ask questions to better understand the situation, but also be direct when explaining how you’re feeling and communicating your needs.
The Problem
On the other end of the spectrum from lack of commitment is over dependence—the fourth challenge. It occurs when mentees or mentors become too involved or too reliant on the mentoring relationship. Mentees may hesitate to make independent decisions, solve problems, or take action without consulting their mentor first. Mentors may get over-involved and become too controlling of a mentees’ professional life and development. Over dependence can also lead to excessive emailing or messaging between meetings.
The Solution
Set and enforce appropriate boundaries. Reference your agreed-upon rules or boundaries of the mentoring relationship if the other party is taking up too much of your time or contacting you outside of agreed-upon meetings or circumstances. Or, one person might explain to the other party the importance of making independent decisions, exploring their own path or solutions, and taking risks for the mentee’s learning and development.
But also, don’t forget to reaffirm your commitment to the mentoring relationship, reinforce what’s working well, and express your appreciation of the other person’s enthusiasm and efforts to maintain good rapport.
The Problem
Finally, sometimes mentors and mentees just aren’t a good fit—your personalities or communication styles clash. You struggle to get along or see each other’s point of view. What should you do in these situations?
The Solution
First, don’t assume that a mentoring relationship won’t work just because the other party has a different communication style, approach, or personality than you. Try to work through your differences and ask yourself, “Is there anything I can learn from them?” Or, “What can our differences teach me, or how can I grow because of them?”
Instead of brushing aside your issues or pushing your differences under the rug, try discussing them directly and openly. For example, what challenges is your mentee facing that you did not face? Why might they have a different perspective than you? And how might your experiences differ because of age, gender identity, race, socioeconomic status, or other factors?
If you still can’t work through your differences—or the relationship isn’t productive for either party—then both mentee and mentor may agree to end the mentoring relationship early. If you decide on this option, just make sure to follow these best practices:
Summary
Key Takeaways
A mentor can accelerate your professional development by sharing their skills, knowledge, and experience. They give advice, provide feedback, and expose you to the skills and habits that cultivate success. To find and foster a successful mentoring relationship, practice these key takeaways:
The right mentor can supercharge your career. However, a mentoring relationship requires mutual trust, commitment, and shared understanding to succeed.