How To Know If You Have A Mentor Or Tormentor

This article was originally posted on Forbes Coaches Council .

If you’re someone committed to your own success and achieving your goals, you probably have a lot of mentors in your life. This is important because, in my experience, people who are coached, mentored or sponsored get more promotions, make more money and have less workplace stress. But what happens if mentorship starts to work against you? Today we’re going to talk about when your mentor turns into a tormentor.

First, we need to get clarity on the difference between mentors and tormentors and then put guidelines in place to make sure you have plenty of the former, and none of the latter. Mentors are people who offer advice, help solve problems, serve as a sounding board and share their learned experience to help you learn and grow. They guide you to become stronger and, ultimately, better at what you do so you’re able to achieve all that you can.

Take a moment and do a self-check:

• How many mentors do you have?
• Who are they and have they been helpful?

Sometimes mentors go too far and actually move you away from your goals, becoming what we might call tormentors. Tormentors, consciously or unconsciously, take advantage of the mentoring relationship and may stress you out more than they lift you up.

To give you an example, I once coached a vice president who wanted to be elevated to an executive at her company. The partner she was working for delegated a lot of his work to her without consulting her on what the work was and without having any supportive meetings about what she needed or wanted to get out of her career. She ended up doing a lot of grunt work — taking meeting notes for him and completing tasks that made her feel like more of an assistant than a mentee. As a result, she felt stretched too thin and not on track for her goals. She thought impressing the executive and leaning on him as a mentor would help her get that promotion. Instead, not only was she not learning, but she also wasn’t even getting credit for the work because he always presented it as his own. She didn’t get visibility, credit or the learning that she had hoped to gain from her “mentor.”

If any of that sounds familiar to you, let’s do another self-check:

• Do you ever find yourself doing work for your “mentor” that you don’t get credit for?
• Are you sometimes given so much work by your “mentor” that you don’t have time to work on what’s important to you?
• Does your “mentor” fail to offer the support you need to realize your goals?

If you discover your tormentor is masquerading as a mentor, the best way to start getting back on track is to carve out some time for yourself to think of your own goals and regain clarity about what you’re trying to achieve.

Ask yourself:

• How would the ideal mentor support you in that?
• Who are the people that would meet those criteria?
• Do your mentors measure up?

If they don’t, start easing up on that relationship and look for a mentor who does. You want a mentor who knows who you are and gives you challenging work that gets you where you want to go. Even if the work is challenging at times, it should be valuable and your mentor should be shepherding you toward your goals through the exercise.

Develop a relationship with them, share with them your vision and goals for your career, communicate your interest in the promotion and ask if there is anything they can do to help. Move away from any tormentors in your life, and know that when you have true mentors in place, you will feel supported, championed and well on your way to creating the career you want.

You can read more of my leadership advice on Forbes Coaches Council.