ThemePeople & Network
CardCard 33 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Mentorship

Give & receive help

The people who have helped you develop, and the people you help in return, are part of what makes a career more than just a sequence of jobs.

Mentorship tends to be thought of as a formal arrangement between an experienced person and a junior one. In practice, the most useful mentoring relationships are often more informal: a conversation with someone who has navigated something you are about to navigate, a person who asks you better questions than you ask yourself, or someone who tells you honestly what they see in you.

At different stages, you are on both sides of this. You are receiving guidance from people who are further along, and you are giving it to people who are earlier in their path. Both matter and both teach you things. The act of articulating what you know, for someone who needs to hear it, is one of the clearest ways to understand what you actually know.

Mentorship also includes sponsorship: not just advice but active support, introductions, and the willingness to put your name behind someone. Knowing who has done that for you, and thinking about who you do it for, is a meaningful dimension of professional life.

How to work on it

Practical ways to reflect on and develop this dimension of your working life. How it tends to look at different stages of a career, and where to put your attention.

Early career

Identify a few people whose careers and judgment you respect, and find ways to get their input. You do not need a formal mentoring arrangement: a single good conversation can be enough.

Mid career

Start being deliberate about who you mentor, not just who mentors you. The people you invest time in early often become some of your most significant professional relationships.

Later career

Think about the kind of mentor you wish you had had, and be that for someone who needs it. The investment of an hour or two can change the shape of someone else's career.

Any stage

Look at your current relationships honestly. Who is really investing in you, and who are you investing in? Are there imbalances you want to address?

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

Who has most influenced how you work and how you think about your career, and have you told them?
Is there someone whose input you would benefit from right now, and what is stopping you from reaching out?
Who do you mentor, formally or informally, and what does that relationship give both of you?
What do you know now that you wish someone had told you earlier, and who might need to hear it from you?
Where in your field do you feel a gap in the guidance available, either for yourself or for people coming behind you?

Things to notice

Mentorship is not the same as validation. A mentor who only affirms your existing thinking is less useful than one who asks hard questions.
It is easy to want mentorship without being ready to receive it honestly. Being mentored well requires some vulnerability and a genuine willingness to hear things you might not want to hear.
Good mentorship goes in multiple directions. Even early in your career, you have things to offer people who are newer than you, and people later in their careers often learn from those coming up.