Where to get that great Mentor and Mentee Connection

As an addition to my last article "How to Jump Start your Career in Environmental", I would like to discuss the topic on Mentors and Mentees. I believe both have their roles to fill and like many of the comments in the previous article, are a great way to get ahead in life. The mentor and mentee relationship goes beyond supervisor and technician, rather you as a mentor have selected this one person to carry on a piece of your legacy (so choose well) and you as the mentee have selected someone special to look up to (so also choose well). Both parties in this relationship must select carefully, because you are expending time, effort and resources from you and them. Let me clarify as follows:

Why you as a Mentee need to be selective in choosing a Mentor

You will want to avoid reaching out to every professional or successful person and asking them to simply mentor you. Why? One point of view I have is, as a mentor, my stake in your growth is heavily dependent on my existing relationship with you. It is very different when I choose to mentor someone with 100% of my heart vs being nice and commenting on some of your work. So as a mentee, make sure you are selecting someone you trust (which means you have to know them), someone you aspire to become (but always remember it is your life "own it" - Carl) and someone who has your best interest at heart. Understanding this, proposing coffee or lunch to a prospecting mentor that you are essentially cold calling is not enough to solidify a strong relationship. Imagine the process being similar to dating, where you wouldn't commit to a relationship over one cup of coffee or lunch, right? Well, a mentor and mentee relationship is quite intimate and would require rapport, an understanding of one another and something beyond coffee. Then as the relationship grows, you will deepen that bond with a strong foundation of mutual experiences (going through the pain together is great!) and mutual respect.

As a mentee, it is your job to put everything you have to the lessons learned. What does that mean? You need to put in as much or more effort than your mentor. If your mentor is working 12 hours a day on their craft, you need to do the same to show that you respect them taking time away from their busy schedule to teach you (also how else are you supposed to catch up to them?). This is why you need to know who you are being mentored by ahead of time and have a sense of who that person really is as well as how they got to where they are now. If my mentee is not willing to put in as much time as me, then I do not have the time of day to drag them along with me.

As a mentee, you better be writing down our discussions, meetings and lessons to be reflected upon later, on top of doing your regularly scheduled tasks. Understand that the mentor has a specific pace (typically a quick pace) and will not be willing to slow down because you forgot to write things down.

I personally had to prove to the CEO of one my past companies that I had what it takes to be considered for mentorship. What did that involve? Before I received the one and a half years of training, I put in months of sleepless nights, showing constant signs of progress, under promising and over delivering to a degree that would be acceptable to her (which is essentially her standards). If I could show her that I could perform as well as or better than what she expects of herself than maybe she would teach me how she became so successful. I do not recall the exact date, but she approached and said (I'm paraphrasing) you will now be working harder than you have ever worked before, do not quit on me. I was both excited (I really wanted to be successful) and terrified as I just had a record of one to two all-nighters per week for the past months. I could not imagine working harder than what I did to prequalify for this mentorship. She did not disappoint.

What makes a great Mentor (in my opinion)

Honestly, every great mentor is different in their style as some may shout, some may seldom give you the recognition you really want, some may punish, some may reward and they come in all shapes and sizes. However, I believe deep down they all have the same core qualities that make them great. They have all worked really hard to get to where they are now, they have all made huge mistakes and overcome them, they have grown thick skin to brush off rejection, they greet failure as an old friend, they do not remember their successes as they do not put the same amount of importance in them as we do, and the ones I meet have problems taking direction from authority (I'm not referring to law breakers, but they like to do things their own way).

How to find that great Mentor

I believe after graduation, your first few careers should be based on who will be managing and teaching you. During that interview process, the most important question is not "how much will I make", rather "who will be the one managing me going forward". Therefore, during the interview, while you are putting your best foot forward, you should be assessing if the person in front of you is the person you can look up to.

For those that have some experience and believe they need to move on to learn, please understand, it will not be easy. You are now sacrificing the comfort of being the best at what your current position demands and are now asking for discomfort to grow. I had instant regrets when I left an amazing company to learn more, but I came back a much stronger person with skills that elevated my ability to push the business forward.

I had moments when I felt my mentor was not doing what I expected, which I later found out was a complaint very commonly linked to laziness. There is no cheap trick that will instantly reward you success and wealth, there is no short cut other than putting in the time, but now you get guidance! You get to avoid the dead end paths your mentor had to experience and you miss out on some of their pitfalls and heartaches. In my youth, I thought that the mentor was going to spoon feed me the best ideas and make it easier to give me success. No! What a mentor does is accelerate your success by giving you the map, but you can only achieve it through tons of work (imagine condensing what they learned in decades to half or a third of that time).

One example in my life, I wanted to learn how to write a business plan, so I asked my mentor if she could teach me. She said yes, so I waited and waited for several weeks. I started to get frustrated that she had forgotten our discussion and did not respect my request. I eventually approached her and expressed my absolute discontent to which she replied, I am still waiting for your draft to review and comment on. That was my moment of realization of my own laziness in the matter. I had selfishly asked for the answers and demanded a handout. Never again!

If you have read this article and leave with nothing else, remember that you will not always find a mentor (sometimes it is difficult so go to the library and read tons of books), you will not always find the mentor you want (but you may find the mentor you need) and you need to put in the work to make the most out of a mentorship.