How do I find a good mentor?

I'm often asked, "How do I find a good mentor?" Last time, I wrote about how to grow your career and how it's helpful to have a good mentor, or five. My suggestion for finding a good mentor is to: set goals?, determine competencies?, tap in to your network?, ask and offer?, and rinse and repeat?.

It’s really important to be clear about why you want mentoring and then to set goals and develop a plan. Did someone suggest that you get a mentor? If so, ask them what outcomes they expect if you do. Do you feel like you’re a bit stuck in your career growth and you’re not sure why? Or are you looking to further accelerate your career growth but you’re not sure how? Those are great examples of topics to discuss with a mentor.

You may want to do a root cause analysis, leveraging techniques like 5 whys or Ishikawa diagrams, to really understand what’s getting in your way. A sort of boot-strap mentor may be able to help you with that, and even help you with setting goals and developing a plan. But that mentor will likely not be the ideal candidate for achieving your goals, or may bias towards goals that are familiar to them.

I get a lot of requests for mentoring others, and I suspect it’s because of my work experience. I’d bet young engineers see in me the role they want to reach. But my career journey is unique and what works for me may not work for everyone. It’s much better to work backwards from your goals than to work forwards to a particular person. So choose that boot-strap mentor carefully or do the prep work on your own.

I find it helpful to think about finding a mentor the same way I’d find any needed talent. To identify the right candidate, you’ll need a good role definition. For a mentor, that means looking at your goals and figuring out the competencies that an ideal mentor would have.

Competencies are the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be successful in a role, e.g. designing large-scale distributed systems or leading large organizations with multiple levels of managers. If you end up with a long list of competencies, it may not be realistic to expect a single person to exemplify all of them, so you may need to find multiple mentors.

Another challenge is that you may not be able to figure out the competencies necessary in a mentor to achieve your goals. We hold our mentors in high regard, and they’re often individuals we admire and wish to emulate. It’s almost like defining the role of your manager. We don’t necessarily know what makes our mentors successful, or how to evaluate whether or not they have a particular competency.

If necessary, resort to outcomes as opposed to competencies. You can look to your goals for these outcomes, but try to be more specific than “Help me get promoted to the next level.”

Once you have the role definition, then it’s time to start identifying candidates. Check with your network of contacts, “Do you know anyone who’s really good at navigating organizations?” Use tools like the your company's mentoring site or LinkedIn.

Good mentors, like most good talent, aren’t often actively looking for mentees. They’re in high demand and already typically have all the mentees that they want. So you’ll have to search for them, they won’t likely search for you. Once you’ve identified some candidates, try to learn as much as you can about them so that you can 1) validate that they have the competencies you’re looking for, and 2) identify what you have to offer them.

The last, and possibly most difficult task is to engage them. Don’t skip the work to learn about the candidate. I like the way one person I've seen described what not to do: “i [recruiter] really want to talk with you. i have a need you can fill. i won't spend the effort to meet your needs. but give me your time anyways.”

I can’t speak for all mentors, but for me, mentoring is rewarding because I love helping others and watching them succeed, and I love learning new things from people. So a good pitch to someone like me would be: “Here’s why I’ll be successful with your help, and here are some things that I can teach you.”

If you find asking difficult, as I would, then try thinking about the low risks of rejection compared to the high rewards of propelling your career and achieving your goals. If you’re worried about wasting someone’s time, try letting them worry about that instead. Even if someone says “no”, they may still refer you to someone else who’s more suitable or has more capacity.

If you’re not sure about the candidate’s competencies, ask them, “I’m struggling with this particular issue. Are you good with those situations?” A good, self-aware mentor may respond, “No, I’m terrible with those situations, but I’m good with these other situations.”

Finally, once you’ve found a good mentor, and achieved your goals with that mentor, you’ll probably want to set some new goals and find another mentor. Or, you may learn that your mentor isn’t what you expected, and you’ll need to find a new one. Or, you may serendipitously come across someone who would be a great mentor for you. Whatever the case, I recommend always keeping your search for a mentor active.

So that's how I answer the question, "How do I find a good mentor?":

1. set goals
2. determine competencies
3. tap in to your network
4. ask and offer?
5. rinse and repeat?

Hope that helps. What do you think? Do you have any other questions I can answer? Let me know in the comments!

#LuusAnswers #CareerAdvice #Mentoring