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.