A Quick Guide for Successful Mentoring Relationships

I’ve been very blessed to have many great mentors over my 27-year career, and as I grew more senior and had experiences to share, I had the opportunity to work with many eager and wonderful mentees too. It’s extremely rewarding to be able to give back in this way, and after being an active mentor for the last 15 years, I am routinely asked for advice on how to be a valuable mentor and how to make that relationship work in a mutually beneficial way. 

Since this is probably one of the topics I’m asked about most often in a professional context, I thought a post here on LinkedIn would be a great way to provide some thoughts on how I think about mentoring relationships and share some suggested guidelines for how to get the most out of them – whether you’re the mentor or mentee.

• Do a quick chemistry check. You can learn a lot about your potential, long-term attraction to someone in the initial 15 minutes of a first date, and I don’t think mentoring is that dissimilar. Hopefully, you’ve sought someone out to be a mentor who you think you might click with because their leadership style resonates with you, but a lot of the success of the relationship purely comes down to pairing yourself with someone you trust, respect and have a rapport with out of the gate. Do you have the same values? Do you share a similar sense of humor? Is it someone you’d want to be a friend of yours if they weren’t a mentor?
• Don’t mentor anyone in your management chain. I have had some healthy debates with people about this topic over time, but if you’re a senior person in your organization, I don’t recommend mentoring anyone who may be a report somewhere on your team. I recommend against this because if the mentee confides in you that they’re struggling with their manager, and that manager reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to you, you’re somewhat obligated to go address the management challenge if it’s in your org. And you now have an opinion about someone whose career you may have influence over, but you’re biased in your view because of your conversations with the mentee - which isn’t totally fair to that manager given how one-sided that perspective might be. Generally, I think it’s just cleaner to not mentor people in your organization.
• Uphold confidentiality without exception.  As you work on an issue together, it’s likely that your mentee may end up sharing things with you that they wouldn’t want repeated, so I always establish up front with the mentee that I will hold everything they tell me in the strictest of confidence - unless they give me explicit permission to share the information under specific circumstances. Mutual trust is perhaps the most key pillar of a truly productive relationship between mentors and mentees.
• Seek out diverse people and perspectives. In my early days of mentoring, I didn’t pause long enough to realize that my mentees were all variations of, well, me. At one point, it finally dawned on me that all of my mentees were middle-aged, mid-career women who tended to be in fields like the ones I was most familiar with: marketing and communications. Over time, I realized I owed it to myself and to other employees in the company who wouldn't have been in my natural orbit to diversify my relationships and ended up mentoring a whole host of people from a variety of backgrounds, races, areas of expertise, etc. It made all the difference in that it introduced new viewpoints about a variety of topics and evolved my thinking on the different challenges encountered by people who were not – or hadn’t been – in my shoes. I learned so much from all of them, and I’m particularly grateful to people like Ya Xu, Kevin Simon, Frank Sherfey and Erin Mathurin for being so generous in helping me see others’ world views.
• Make sure to bound the time commitment. I always recommend setting up the timing expectation up front with the mentee. For example, letting them know “we’ll meet once a month for one hour for six months starting next week” is very helpful for planning purposes and provides a sense of clarity for both sides. I have found that people are more focused in the sessions and less likely to cancel or reschedule if they know there is a finite timeline involved. It’s also helpful to know that this iteration of the relationship isn’t in perpetuity, so that the mentor make room for other new and deserving mentees. (The credit for this guidance goes to Mike Derezin who shared this with me a few years ago.)
• Find something specific to work on together. I have had potential mentees come to meetings wanting mentorship - but without a clear idea of what they want to work on or what they want to get out of the relationship. The mentoring sessions where we are working on something super specific together, like how to get better at public speaking or how to make more data-driven decisions, are usually the most productive because it’s more actionable and typically applicable in many real-time situations. Also, the progress someone is making is very measurable, so that makes both sides feel great about the time being invested in the relationship.

If you’re someone who would like to become a mentor or someone who wants a mentor, I hope this proves to be valuable guidance for you. Some of these relationships can be true career highlights for both the mentor and mentee, and while they can be time-consuming, they’re very rewarding and very worthwhile. I am very grateful to all of the mentors I have had over the years who helped me become a better professional version of myself and to the amazing mentees who enriched my life with their stories of growth.