“In every film. where there's a character who is good at something or does well, at the end, it’s always because they have a mentor. It's not because it's luck or to make the plot of the film make sense: it’s because people that have got experience can pass that experience onto you, so that you don’t have to learn the lesson yourself. ”
Zach Nicholson at Wave Talent
Having a good mentor can open a lot of doors. A mentor can help you hone your career aspirations, expand your network, introduce you to hiring managers, help you meet relevant peers and assist you to work on development goals.
Though 76% of people believe having a mentor is important, only 37% of people have one. There’s confusion about what counts as mentoring and reticence about how to go about getting some mentorship.
So how do you find the right mentors for you? And how do you maximize the value of your mentor relationships? Let’s go through it.
What is mentorship?
Mentorship origins
The word ‘mentor’ originates from ancient Greek epic poetry. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus leaves his kingdom of Ithaca to go and fight in the Trojan War (portrayed in the Illiad), he leaves his son Telemachus under the guidance of an older man called Mentor. Periodically the goddess of wisdom, Athena, impersonates Mentor and gives Telemachus valuable and nurturing advice.
“The name perhaps ultimately means "adviser," because in form it is an agent noun of mentos "intent, purpose, spirit, passion" from PIE *mon-eyo- (source also of Sanskrit man-tar- "one who thinks," Latin mon-i-tor "one who admonishes"), causative form of root *men- (1) "to think."”
Online Etymology Dictionary
Today most of us are familiar with the concept of mentorship, but in fact popularity of the term ‘mentor’ increases sharply from c. 1980 to the current day. It’s correlated to the shift from careers for life to shorter, multiple jobs.
Popularity of the term Mentor in the Google Books corpus since 1800 (for more information on Google Books Ngram viewer, see here)
Peter Capelli, Professor of Management at the Wharton School states that
“Companies had a surplus of white-collar managers, and reengineering waves in corporations were about getting rid of people…Companies told mentors, ‘We’re trying to get rid of people, so we can’t promote your mentee.'” Although bosses continued to play an important role as mentors when they could, the supervisor-subordinate model waned and companies sought other ways to help workers navigate their way in the workplace. According to Cappelli: “Companies said, ‘What do we do for these folks? Bosses aren’t helping them anymore.’ The idea became to find mentors who weren’t necessarily someone you worked closely with or for. Instead of your supervisor, your mentor became somebody you could bounce ideas off of and get career advice from. It became more low-impact.”
Knowledge at Wharton; Workplace Loyalties Change but the Value of Mentoring Doesn’t
Today’s mentoring model is even more deconstructed, especially in the technology industry. Formalised programs are less and less common, with networking communities and ‘speed’ mentoring becoming ever more common. As a result it’s best to approach mentorship as a series of advice conversations and not to get too hung up on a formalised relationship.
How mentorship typically works
Mentorship is when someone with more experience helps someone with less experience. The mentor is usually in the same field as the person being mentored, gives advice and support over a long time, and cares about the other person’s overall growth. They share what they’ve learned from their own career.
Coaching is more about helping someone get better at certain skills or reach specific goals. Coaches don’t need to work in the same field as the person they’re helping. Instead, they have expertise in the coaching process itself, including the ability to motivate, offer constructive feedback, and encourage self-reflection to improve performance. Coaching often has a set time frame and clear steps to follow.
The main differences are:
- Knowledge
- Mentors have done the same work as the people they help.
- Coaches know how to coach, even if they haven’t done the same job.
- Rules
- Mentorship is flexible; you talk when you need to.
- Coaching has a schedule and steps to follow.
- Relationship
- Mentors may be paid or unpaid.
- Coaches are usually paid, or it may be part of their job description.
- Support
- Mentoring often features a personal connection.
- Coaching is generally a purely professional relationship.
Both mentorship and coaching help people grow, but they do it in different ways. They can be really useful at different times in someone’s life or career. Sometimes they can mix a bit, like when a mentor helps with specific skills or a coach becomes a long-term helper.
In this article, we’re focused on helping you find an mentor who can help you grow over a prolonged period, as this offers the greatest benefit for the least cost. (But if you have the opportunity to get coaching as well, you should go for it!)
What’s the value of mentorship and why is it a good idea to have one?
Mentors provide value in the form of:
- Coaching and advice: helping you with workplace challenges and opportunities
- Career guidance: steering you towards your career goals
- Practical knowledge: preventing you from having to reinvent the wheel
- Connections: a mentor can introduce you to new people
- Perspective: helping you reframe situations in a different way
This isn’t just a one way street however, and mentees also provide value back to the people mentoring them. This is known as “reverse mentoring”:
- Alternate perspectives: just as a mentor’s lived experience and position in an organisation’s hierarchy can add value to the mentee, equally the reverse is true.
- Different knowledge: mentees may have industry, technical or operational experience that the mentor might not have.
- Active assistance: mentees can help mentors with tasks. That might be as simple as providing feedback on all hands presentations or helping them with a managerial topic that they’re thinking through.
- Expanding network: typically the majority of hiring happens at the lower levels of the organisation. Just as mentees are looking for value from a mentor’s more senior network, equally well a mentor might be looking for referrals to people they can hire.
Additionally a Gartner study in 2006 examined the impact of mentorship on over 1000 employees employed at Sun Microsystems over a 5 year period. The findings were that
- Mentors and mentees were 5x more likely to receive a salary increase
- Mentors were promoted 6 times more often than those not in the program
- Mentees were promoted 5 times more often than those not in the program
- Retention rates were much higher for mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than for employees who did not participate in the mentoring program (49%).
There is a correlation between high performance and mentor attraction. But this is only because there is a tendency for higher performers to have already mastered the ‘mentorship skill’.
“Something I’ve noticed while I’ve been mentoring… is that how these founders think about mentoring actually is a predictor of their success… they get much more time out of these important people than they would perhaps deserve, which is a real skill, and something which these guys have mastered… But I think the corollary is also true. The people who don’t master mentoring never actually seem to get off the ground. So if I invest in a company and I don’t hear from them for a month, I’ve sort of mentally almost written them off, because they’re not going to master the skill. They think they’re going to be doing it on their own and that’s a fallacy. They won’t be able to do it. So great mentors attract great founders and great founders attract great mentors… The reason why those successful people I’ve mentioned earlier are great founders is because they ask lots of people their advice, and they listen to lots of advice, and then they come with their own decision.”
– Russell Buckley, “Mentors – The Entrepreneurs’ Unfair Advantage”
Putting it another way: not asking for advice leads to worse outcomes, and asking for a lot of advice leads to better outcomes.
