Take Your Career to the Next Level: Five Steps to Finding and Using a Mentor

A mentor is a free, portable, personal resource to help you set and achieve your unique goals. Mentoring is an explicit one-on-one learning relationship between a person who wants to improve their job or career skills and a person who can help them do so. Mentors are much more than people to go to. Mentors are champions of learning. Mentors take a position of high interest and investment in the development of others. They want to be mentors. They share knowledge, encouragement, guidance, and feedback on job content and organizational culture. They advocate for the successes of their trainees. Mentoring provides encouragement and structure to support the learner. In the ideal, tutoring and tutoring are business as usual.

Why should you have one? You are good at what you do. You are the one who helps customers solve their problems. You help your clients prosper. You are totally focused on your success. Who does that for you? Are you so busy meeting other people’s needs that you neglect your own? How are you doing?

• build your career?
• Expand your experience?
• develop their talents?
• Gain skills?
• Overcome your weaknesses?
• Manage the culture in your organization?

Your manager might be a logical choice for advice, but that person is probably just as busy as you are. You have a solid work pool, but you have aspirations that require individual attention. A mentor is not likely to volunteer uninvited. You have to find yours.

Here’s a simple five-step process for finding the help you want and using the help you find. Nothing here will surprise you. The process is intuitive, but working through it requires discipline, and that is the great challenge. This structure is designed to keep you on track, but with the flexibility to serve you throughout your career. Without structure, mentoring tends to become irregular and less effective.

1. Define what you want to achieve and what help you need. Are you looking for technical expansion, professional growth, objectivity, creativity, connections, etc.?

Examine yourself and be honest about what you need to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing to get there. Professionals like you cultivate trust, so others may not notice your shortcomings. You can be completely honest with a mentor, which is part of the purpose of having one. The more clearly you can see your strengths and weaknesses, the more willing you are to explain them to someone you trust, the more successfully you will work with a mentor.

2. Find people who can offer you what you want, whom you admire and who feel honored by your request. A critical characteristic any mentor must have is a passion for helping others succeed. Do not be shy. Ask your colleagues to help you conduct your search. It’s similar to a job search: You want the best possible match. You define what the “best match” looks like. Think about confidence, communication styles, and perspective differences, in addition to career-related qualities. You can find your mentor at the desk next to yours or online in a different geographic location. You can find more than one mentor at a time, depending on your goals.

3. Tutoring Relationship Agreement. The number one reason tutoring works is because the learning experience is tailored exactly to you and what you need. You and your mentor together define that shape.

There are two parts to the learning contract: the definition of roles and the specific learning objectives. Sometimes the apprenticeship contract is written, sometimes verbal. Always, it is explicit. Because the mentoring process is a work in progress, clarity and structure keep it moving. It is a framework within which you and your mentor can be creative and forward-thinking. It provides enough structure to keep the process focused and moving, with built-in flexibility to continually assess and improve. Without that structure, the mentoring process can go off the rails and become less than optimally effective.

Here is a simple initial “contract” for the mentoring process. You’ll probably want to add to it to meet your own expectations.

I, the mentee, need you, the mentor, for your individual attention, expertise, support, encouragement, open and honest feedback, and trust.
You, the mentor, can expect from me, the mentee, my enthusiasm to learn, a willingness to ask for help, a willingness to take risks, open and honest feedback, and trust.

Refine your goals with the help of your mentor. Determine how to interact and how often. Find the best ways to exchange feedback. Virtual tutoring is becoming more and more popular and provides maximum tutoring portability. Email, phone, text messages, social networks, Skype… The ways to stay in touch are almost endless and increasing every day. Talk about ending the mentoring relationship early on. Step 5 shouldn’t be a surprise. What will indicate that it is time for a change, from both perspectives? Also talk about how you will communicate if tutoring isn’t working out, for whatever reason.

4. Check in with your mentor as planned. One of the biggest challenges for professionals is asking for specific help. We make a living by sharing our experience, and it’s hard to take advantage of someone else’s. The best advice is “just do it”. Having a mentor is useless if you don’t use that person. Your mentor cannot guess how to help you. These contacts should be of high priority to both of you.

5. Review or end formal mentoring when you reach your goals, or when new needs arise that change your direction. This may mean rehiring around new goals, moving into a less formal relationship, or finding a new mentor. Mentoring is a long-term relationship, but it doesn’t have to be for life. You are smart, ambitious and creative. You learn fast and move towards new goals. Mentoring must be totally relevant to what is happening for you at any given moment. When relevancy drops, it’s a clue that it’s time to change. Ending formal mentoring is not an insult to the mentor, but rather a tribute to how helpful that person was. Very often, mentors and mentees remain close friends and mentoring continues informally as needed.