I started my company because of one woman.
She is the most important person in my professional career. She doesn’t call herself my mentor, but I do every day to anyone who will listen.
Over the last three years, she was the first person I looked to when determining how to navigate a tricky team dynamic, advocate for myself, ask to lead my own team, and meet others to guide me.
On Christmas Eve, I called her while she was waiting for her daughter at the Lush store that to tell her I had found a potential business partner, but I wasn’t sure if it was time to launch a company.
In that conversation, virtually every question she asked made it clearer and clearer to me that I didn’t know what I was doing.
“Maybe I’m not ready for this. What if I’m not good at this? What if I let people down?”
She answered, “You’re going to hustle harder than anyone and figure it out. But the question, Alida, is not ‘am I good?’ but ‘am I learning?’ If you’re learning, you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to.”
When I thought about the business moving forward, I reframed it as the biggest learning opportunity I’d ever have, not to mention one that would allow me to actualize my deep-seated mission of helping every tech company become the best possible place to work.
Cut to now — every day, I wear a bracelet that says, “always learn.” At any time I feel I’m losing sight of my biggest goal, I look down at my wrist and re-internalize its message.
That’s why even though I spent years as a career coach, I always start with one question when professionals ask how to develop as leaders: do you have a mentor?
We all vaguely understand what mentorship is. We imagine an experienced person providing guidance to a less experienced person.
But what does that look like in practice? And how does mentorship differ from coaching?
As Adam Fisher explains in Tribe of Mentors, coaches “focus on you first. Mentors rightly focus on themselves first and you second…a good coach builds regimens designed to make you better [versus simply] providing advice, as a mentor would.”
The biggest differentiator between coaches and mentors is that coaches are paid to professionally design performance-enhancing exercises for their teams. Even within companies, coaches are tasked with tailoring practices specific to the needs of those they coach.
Mentors offer their time free of charge and often develop more personal relationships with their mentees. They provide guidance, advice, and recommendations based on their own lived experiences.
“The best mentors will open and read from the private pages of their lives so that you may learn from their mistakes,” writes Leslie Odom Jr. in Failing Up.
The mentor — mentee relationship extends beyond one person giving advice to another. There is a deep personal connection, one built on trust and a shared recognition that challenges exist at work — and everywhere else — but that valuable lessons can be gleaned and put to good use.
Mentors are willing to take their personal hard-won lessons and give them to others.
“Knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.” — Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” from Men Without Women
Mentors have lasting impacts on our productivity, performance, and progress.
Teens with mentors are significantly less likely to have behavioral problems, employees with mentors are more likely to stay at their jobs for longer than five years, and millennials with mentors are more likely to be happy at work.
Mentors are the people you can turn to with significant questions such as:
Not only can you engage in these conversations, but good mentors will guide you to answers and behaviors you can enact to see positive change in your career.
As Laurence Shames and Peter Barton emphasize in Not Fade Away:
“What’s unworthy about working to understand who you truly are and what you really want from life? What better use can a person make of his youth?”
Your mentors see you more truly as you are than you can because they take an outside view. They know what you’re thinking and feeling, but they don’t have the same bias around your environments that you do.
Mentors make you feel valued. When you share your experiences with them, they offer their own, which establishes mutual vulnerability. Trust is deeper, and while the relationship is more emotional than many professional ones, the person helping you has the knowledge you need to succeed.
To strengthen your own skills, understand yourself, and find the opportunities that bring you purpose and joy, you need people who can guide you in a deeply personal way that emphasizes connection.
Almost every week, when I ask people whether they have a mentor, they share with me a fear of intrusion, of asking for too much, and of not having anything to give back.
Yet this attitude neglects one critical idea. As Allan B. Wallace points out in Buddhism with an Attitude:
“All phenomenon exists in a state of interdependence; nothing exists independently.”
Your relationship with your mentors doesn’t just impact you, but them as well. If you work hard to be present, take their recommendations to heart, and connect with them on a deeper level, you are giving them something valuable.
It’s also important to remember your mentors have mentors themselves. Professional success largely depends on having a support system with the knowledge and experience to guide progress.
“Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” –Franz Kafka
There is not enough time in a day. Trust me, I feel this pain. One of the major barriers to mentorship is making the time to find mentors, especially if they don’t appear in your life organically or are assigned to you by your workplace.
But clearly, mentorship is important.
The best way to save time and make sure you’re using it purposefully — meaning not spending it on folks who aren’t matches — is to build a process first.
Here are the five steps in mine:
Whether you’ve found an incredible mentor through this new process or already have one you value, understand that the onus is completely on you to build and maintain the relationship.
Mentors are giving you their most precious resource: time. That means it’s your responsibility to set the meeting cadence, schedule the meetings, come prepared with a purpose statement and questions, and follow-up consistently. It also means you need to remember to say thank you and keep them updated on your life.
Here are my rules of thumb.
With all that in mind, it’s important to remember that you don’t have to do everything you mentor advises. As Stephen Spielberg put it, “The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.”
Your choices are your own. This doesn’t mean you should ignore your mentors or plug your ears when they give you tough feedback. It just means that you are your own person, and you should recognize what resonates with you and what doesn’t.
I’ve always struggled with asking for help, and I feel guilty whenever I do. While I lean on my mentors for support regularly, I still don’t feel comfortable doing it.
In response, I have sent hundreds of handwritten thank you notes, made innumerable candles, terrariums, and jewelry, and even volunteered for the causes my mentors support, all with the hope they would see how much their time meant to me.
Even then, I don’t feel I’ve done enough.
What’s mitigated this experience is that I became a mentor myself.
I realized that sharing my lived experiences with others not only helped me gain clarity about parts of my work and life I’d never thought about closely, but could genuinely benefit others who I wanted to succeed.
This struck me when I received a note from someone I’ve mentored for almost two years.
She wrote, “This epiphany, that what I have is not just a ‘how do I say what I want to say in a meeting’ problem, but a power problem — was mostly brought about by you. I am truly grateful for everything you have done for me.”
Helping a young woman I care about have an epiphany about her own relationship to power — what could be more impactful?
To really get the most out of mentorship, you must move beyond cultivating your relationships with your own mentors and become one yourself.
