Deep Dive: Modernizing Mentorship
Re-visiting mentorship for today's workplace and workforce.
Last week one of my content partners, genconnectU, announced they’re doing round two of a new Women in Leadership diploma they certified. I was pleased to be an instructor for round one and am coming back for round two, tackling a framework for modern (and mutual) mentorship. (More info on this program and my discount code at the end of this post.)
The workplace of yesterday vs. today
Most of us probably have a vision of who a mentor is in our head. I’m curious whether your vision of a mentor is based on a workplace that looks like this:
Everyone is working in person
And working full-time
We have the expectation of and ambition for long-term employment and linear development
All within a hierarchical organization and structure
In my early career, a pretty typical career trajectory was to join a company in a somewhat junior role in the organization, and your time served grew, your experience grew, your relationships grew, your skill set grew, and your contributions grew as you went along in that same workforce. Even in times of great opportunity (like for me when I first got into tech during the dot.com boom of the late 90s) you might hop from company to company, but this often acted as an accelerant to that same expected trajectory —linear growth and development and linear increases in title, responsibility, and pay. Traditional mentor relationships were often between someone on a growth-oriented career trajectory and someone who had gotten further ahead on a similar growth path.
In this scenario, a typical mentor was often seen as one person who could be a guru, an oracle, a font of all knowledge when it came to advancing in your career. There were also secondary expectations that a mentor could be a cheerleader and a role model. Basically, a mentor was someone who had been there and done that and could bequeath to you the benefit of their wisdom, their greater experience, and their greater knowledge.
Not only that, but a lot of their wisdom was hopefully in understanding what it took to navigate the workplace or industry you shared. Traditional and hierarchical workplaces often come with quite specific complexities related to advancing within a specific company culture or within a specific industry. A mentor being further along the path meant they had greater understanding of the players and the unspoken morés.
Over the last decade, however, the conventional wisdom about the power of a mentor has evolved. This often gets boiled down into one gendered statement, namely, “Women have mentors, and men have sponsors.” And women, particularly, are encouraged to find sponsors. Even more pointedly, lack of “sponsorship” is often the reason given that the numbers around women and leadership have seemed stubbornly stagnant.
What is a sponsor, and how is it different from a mentor? More than advice-givers, sponsors are expected to be connectors, endorsers, advocates, and champions. Sponsors are seen as the people who say your name in a room where you're not in, get you opportunities, and push you along. Sponsors can be directly responsible for getting you tangible improvements in your career status…maybe a higher position, higher pay, higher benefits, higher opportunity, and so on. In the gendered discussion about women having mentors and men having sponsors, the implication is that women have people who give them advice, pat them on the back, encourage them, and help them learn, often in private settings, but they don't necessarily have the people who are going to slap other people on the back and say, “Hey, did you meet my colleague?...they’re just what you’re looking for.” And “You should consider this person.”
This conventional wisdom about mentors vs. sponsors has been pushed especially towards people who have faced structural barriers and lack of representation, the suggestion being that if you're looking to get ahead, you actually don't want mentors. As a group, underrepresented folks have had enough mentors. No more mentors. We need sponsors. We need people who are going to champion us.
That sounds good on the surface, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Whether seeking a mentor or a sponsor, one thing to bear in mind is that it doesn’t typically come to you. It is much more likely that you are going review the contacts in your network or meet a new contact, and you will consider who you can connect with and make what I call the Big Ask to serve in either role.
Part of what makes the ask so big is the traditional expectation that a mentor or sponsor represents an ongoing, consistent, and significant interaction and relationship. A mentor isn’t expected to be a one-and-done thing. A mentor is someone that you can turn to on the regular. There’s trepidation because you're not just saying, “Can you help with this task?” or “Can you help with this instance?” Instead, you’re asking, “Will you sign up to be in my life?” The risk is that, given the size of the ask, you may think small when it comes to who you feel comfortable or equipped to ask.
Yesterday’s model of mentorship and sponsorship worked for yesterday’s workplace and yesterday’s typical career trajectory. But that same model is a mismatch when applied to today’s workplace, work models, workforce, and career trajectories. Here are some basic truths about today’s workforce that highlight the mismatch:
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The median tenure for workers with one company as long stabilized at around four years. The whole “job for life” trope hasn’t actually been true for most people in the workforce today. Ever.
Recurring financial meltdowns — the dot.com bust, Great Recession and COVID19 employment implosion all occurred within just the past 20 years —have increased the lack of security and stability employees feel they can expect from their employers
Similarly, the number of employees seeking new employment is “phenomenally high” according to a recent study from Monster.com — and while everyone seems to agree that people leave managers, not necessarily jobs, this current job-seeking trend is directly tied to a search for higher pay. Because it’s accurate to assess that you will get bigger bumps in pay by job-hopping than by staying in one place, in other words, employee loyalty isn’t financially rewarding
In 2022 McKinsey reported that 36% of workers consider themselves “independent workers,” up from 27% a mere 5 years earlier. The numbers are highest for those 18-34, so our next generation workforce is accustomed to gig, contract, and freelance work as a matter of course
45% of today’s workers report having a side hustle of some kind. Again, it’s tied to needs for higher income and is more prevalent in the younger generations in the workforce
When you consider this status of today’s workforce, it becomes more obvious that the traditional approach to mentorship, and even sponsorship, made much more sense for the workplaces of years ago, when you could have greater expectation that both you and your mentor would be in the same general space longer term, allowing the development of an ever-closer relationship. And when there was a more stable hierarchy within which to try to try to strategize your career. That is yesterday’s mentorship.
It’s time to modernize our mentorship model. I have some ideas on how to update the mentorship model for today's careers and today's workers, who are much more likely to have many irons in the fire, to be more willing to take leaps and go to different places, and who have access to learn and apply their skills to more roles, more industries, and even geographies than ever before.
Uni-tasking is the way to go, even with mentorship
The data are pretty clear that we are not the talented multi-taskers we may consider ourselves to be.
A study from MIT shows that switching between tasks comes with a cognitive cost as your brain adjusts, so if you are rapidly task-switching, you’re creating more cognitive overhead and less productivity
Up to 50% of car accidents are attributable to distracted driving, most notably cell phone usage
Melina Unacapher’s work at Stanford not only shows that heavy multi-taskers are less able to filter out irrelevant information, they have lower cognitive capacity and outcomes — for example their memory of what they worked on is worse; they get less done, and they make more errors.
Perhaps the most damning result of this Stanford work is that the heavier multi-taskers have higher confidence in their capabilities to multi-task —and they are plain wrong in assessing those capabilities!
Uni-tasking makes sense when it comes to productivity and professional engagement, particularly around how I support others in the workplace or with their careers and how I ask colleagues to support me.
The first step to applying uni-tasking to your mentorship needs is to move beyond expecting to find one or two individual mentors, instead thinking about building your own mentorship team. Call it your “squad,” your “board of advisors,” or your “kitchen cabinet.”
The idea is that you don’t have to find a perfect individual who brings functional, organizational, strategic, tactical, and networked capabilities to the table on your behalf. Instead, think of turning to different colleagues for different aspects of your growth and development path. Playing to their strengths will build your strengths across the board. I did this accidentally, or perhaps intuitively, 25 years ago when I first got into the technology field. My story is a case study of how uni-tasking mentors can work:
After spending years in another industry, I decided to get into tech. I lived in Silicon Valley, so it made sense to try to enter the dominant industry in my area and find out a) if I like it and b) if I had aptitude for it. Since I was new to the industry I took a junior role in a functional area I worked in in my other industry — I became the VP of Marketing’s administrative assistant.
Luckily, my boss saw my promise, and I had articulated that I was ambitious, so right from the get-go, he included me in meetings or on conference calls that my level certainly didn’t call for. He was teaching by doing and letting me observe. I got a crash course in negotiation, partnership development, assessing potential deals, and the classic 4 Ps of Marketing. The one thing my boss didn’t have was deep technical acumen. I could see it put him at a disadvantage with the PhDs who had founded the company. At the same time, there was an up-and-coming, highly technical product manager who was promoted to Director in order to launch the company’s next-generation product line. He was looking for resources to help him go to market, and he saw I was a pretty good writer. He asked if I could pitch in and help him write marketing materials. Luckily for me, this colleague knew I’d do a better job if I understood the technology he was marketing. We sat in a conference room, and he whiteboarded all of the technical information for me.
Through his efforts I figured out I both liked and had an aptitude for picking up complicated technological concepts and translating them into the language that the non-PhDs in the room could understand. When I moved on to another company, as a product manager, I made sure to find the engineers who loved to teach what they were working on, so I could get the crash course I needed in some of the specific and new-to-me technologies the company was implementing. My first mentor couldn’t have given me that technological mentorship. And my second mentor wasn’t yet at a point in his career where he could have accelerated by business acumen. Together, I had a super mentorship team that crammed years of experience and expertise into my head!
Using my example as a case study you can get a few clues on the kinds of colleagues to seek to fill out your mentor bench. Here are some types of experience and expertise you want to seek out to help you enrich your career:
Someone who is more advanced than you on a similar career path
Someone who has complementary skills vs. overlapping skills
Someone who thinks more like some of your colleagues than like you
Someone who knows your customer’s point of view
In each case, you’re not asking one person to provide guidance on every aspect of your working life or help you navigate every situation. Rather, by having a personal advisory board of people with different experience and expertise, you’re only asking people to comment on aspects that are in their wheelhouse.
The ethos of mutuality and reciprocity
Just as each mentor offers you a unique perspective, in each case, there is a reciprocal perspective you can offer in return. You, too, have complementary skills. If they think like some colleagues that you find yourself struggling to understand, you can serve that same purpose for them. If you are looking to someone higher on the management chain for advice about managing up, you can offer perspective on their challenges managing their team of people at your level. Not only are you lightening the load on each individual mentor, but you are also offering mutuality — a benefit in return.
Modern mentorship relationships have an opportunity to be built with the ethos of reciprocity in mind. This ethos means that you each may help one another — to learn, to grow, and yes, to advance in different ways. This ethos also gives you the opportunity to build lifelong relationships that can ebb and flow as you each continue along your career path. There may be times when the mentee becomes the mentor and back again. Each of you giving and getting value on a needs-based basis.
Making mentor-mentee relationships work
Once you’ve built your mentor team, how do you make the most of all the new, wonderful, mutually beneficial mentorship relationships you now have?
Job #1 before asking someone to enter into a mentorship relationship is to identify your expectations, so that you can communicate them. People are more willing to agree to a request when it’s clear and specific. Furthermore, people are more satisfied with outcomes from a request when their expectations for the outcome are met. If your request is too generalized, you’re not setting up clear expectations and desired outcomes beforehand, which increases the chances you will be dissatisfied.
What kind of expectations should you consider, prioritize, and then communicate?
What kind of role do you expect this mentor can represent in your personal board of advisors? Per the above suggestions on types of mentors to pursue, is this person someone on your path but further along? Do they have a complementary skill set that would help you fill a gap in your knowledge base? Is this someone who reminds you of colleagues you have and could use help relating to and communicating with? Is this someone who may have deeper understanding of your customer point of view? Why this person and why now?
What kind of guidance and advice do you most seek? Technical education? Business savvy? Relationship-building? Career navigation? Process improvement?
How closed-ended vs. open-ended is your ask? Someone can mentor you about a specific area of growth for you, and that’s all you’re asking for. And some potential mentors may feel trepidation about committing to an open-ended relationship, but would be more than happy to teach you about one particular area of mutual interest.
How important is it to you that this person be willing to encourage you? Keep you accountable? Say your name in rooms you’re not in? Make introductions? Be a reference? What kind of support will be most meaningful to you from this person?
How much vulnerability do you hope for? Do you crave personal storytelling and role modeling?
Are you looking for support in or out of your current chain of command or client base? How much confidentiality and trust will be required?
Naming and prioritizing your own expectations is a necessary first step in articulating a compelling ask to a potential mentor that will prompt an easy “yes” in response!
You likely know all the elements of being in a good relationship with people in your network. Time and life commitments get to us all, though, and it’s a known fact that digital communications and platforms create the illusion that our networks can be limitless when our human brains and bandwidth can’t support limitless connections.
Your mentors, though, should be priority #1 for you amongst professional connections. So, all those elements of being in a good relationship, which I will list just a few of here, must absolutely be committed to and kept up with this group of contacts:
Keep your commitments, do what you say you’re going to do, and be on time doing it. Don’t miss or constantly reschedule your meetings. If you say you’re going to make an intro or otherwise take a tangible helpful step for your mentor, do it when and just as you said you would.
Make it a point to know, acknowledge, and celebrate when appropriate your mentors’ milestones and significant life events and relationships. I understand this can be tough. I sometimes agonize when I don’t remember a connection’s spouse or kids’ names, despite knowing I should know. Or when I miss a birthday. I have tried to rectify this by updating their contact in my contact tool to include this information. Follow them on social platforms and like or comment on their shares. Re-share when it feels authentic. Call me old-fashioned, but I call it good manners.
Do lightweight shares when you come across a book or article or course or post that you think would be edifying for your mentor. Just a quick link shared via whatever platform feels right -- text, email, LinkedIn message, FB message. A quick link with a note that you thought this would be relevant to their work or was related to your last conversation can go a long way toward providing that mutual value.
If life or your mentorship needs change enough that you can no longer commit to being in a mutually beneficial mentorship relationship with someone, be honest, be grateful, and bring it up with them before they notice something is up and feel compelled to bring it up with you.
With any luck, you’ll have relationships that last decades, with all the benefits such strong relationships can confer on you and on them! Go forth and lead one another forward, building modern, mutual mentorship relationships. Good luck!
On that note: What have been your most fulfilling mentor or mentee experiences?
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