What is the best use of your mentor's time
My inbox frequently gets filled with requests from young professionals and startup founders looking to brainstorm with someone—people who are at crossroads and don’t know what to do next, possibly seeking a mentor or guide. This email was from someone who had sent me a LinkedIn request just the previous evening:
“Dear Sir,
I want your advice on my life and my career. I have secured admissions in four business schools. One of them is known for its Human Resources program, and I am getting inclined towards it, but my friends tell me that it is better to do a Finance major. Honestly, I am interested in Marketing. What is your view?”
Most people turn to a mentor or a more seasoned professional for help when they need to make high-impact decisions or are transitioning careers. But reaching out with a vague and impersonal email like this one is not very helpful or the best use of one’s time.A mentor is someone who does more than just give you career advice. Depending on how honest your mentor relationship is, how much you’ve revealed about your career aspirations, and how much time you’ve spent with them, they understand your vision, your dreams, and your obstacles. A mentor-mentee relationship means an ongoing time commitment—at least in the initial stages. So don’t push your mentor away by not respecting their time or coming to them for advice without doing your homework.How does one do that? Let’s first consider what a fulfilling mentor relationship actually looks like. Here’s a personal example to give you a sense of the mutual commitment and benefits.
A True Mentor Commits Time and Resources
When I was thinking about taking up my first role as people manager at Eicher, I had cold feet because I was being entrusted to manage someone who had much more experience than me. I was not sure how to add value to a position that this person had for many years. I reached out to my mentor with this dilemma.My mentor’s biggest tip was to first spend time with my counterpart to learn what he was working on, understand some of his biggest challenges, review interesting solutions he’d deployed, and ask why the role mattered. I then spent time with my mentor thinking through the skills I would need to build and the skills I could draw upon to be successful in that role.More recently, when I took up the role of Chief Learning Officer (CLO) at Wipro, it was a position that did not exist in the organization at that point. Since I didn’t have a predecessor, there was no one I could clarify doubts with about the position. My mentor and I thought about what factors could have triggered the business to create such a position. My mentor advised me to look at the competitive landscape of the industry and craft a set of metrics for my role. He connected me to people in the industry who shared their perspective on how the business was evolving, why this role was important, and what they would want to see of a CLO. Having so much clarity at the beginning was probably the one thing that helped me be successful as a CLO.
3 Guiding Principles for Respecting Your Mentor’s Time
When you’re reaching out to a mentor (or anyone, really) for help, remember some basic rules to make the most of the relationship.
1. Know What You Want
Knowing what you want will help you to articulate what you’re seeking advice on. Going in to meet your mentor without knowing what you want to meet for can be a waste of time for you and your mentor. Think of the meeting like a conversation—not a question-and-answer session. Make it a free-flowing and spontaneous dialogue. If you have a doubt or apprehension, or if you wish to seek a clarification, do it in the moment.Try and block time (whether you need 60 or 90 minutes) in advance so that both you and the mentor are focused and directed. If you have a dilemma that you are seeking advice on, write down a crisp 100-word version of it and email it to your mentor a day or two before. Articulating it ahead of the meeting gives your mentor time to come prepared. This email can be a good conversation starter between you and your mentor. Use the meeting to seek your mentor’s help to reframe the problem.Using my story as example, it was beneficial for me to focus specifically on challenges I felt in my new role at Eicher:When I got apprehensive about taking up the people manager role, my mentor helped me understand how I could value add to an experienced colleague. Until then I had always assumed that as a people manager, I would always have people who were less experienced than me. My mentor helped me get clarity and confidence.When I spoke to my mentor about feeling unprepared as a people manager, he asked me what was making me anxious. We had a candid conversation about what was making me doubt my abilities. He helped me understand how that role would build skills that would be useful no matter what path I chose to follow later. The clarifications help me chart my path for what was a very successful career.
2. Take Notes
Research suggests that you become a better listener by taking notes. Put away mobile devices so that a terrific insight is not lost because you’re distracted by the constant barrage of notifications. After the meeting with your mentor, send a thank you message with the following items extracted from your notes.
- Key take-aways from the meeting.
- Any follow-up action(s) that either of you are committing to. Make sure you state the expected timeline of each action.
- If your mentor needs to introduce you to someone in their network, attach a short bio that your mentor can forward along with their introduction.
Taking notes is invaluable when you are doing an internship <here's why>
3. Use The Time Wisely
Do not ask what you can find out by yourself. When someone asks me to ‘curate a reading list’ for preparing a presentation, it tells me that the person is looking for a research assistant, not a mentor. And that’s an instant excitement damper.
Remember the Real Value of a Mentorship
Your mentor can help you:
- Build greater awareness about your current role and its impact on future choices
- Help make sense of what is happening in your organization or the industry
- Help you gather speed in achieving your goals and understand their pros and cons
- Help you understand if you need to make course-corrections now to fulfill your long-term goals
Don’t expect your mentor to make the decision for you. It is your career, so you must make and own the decision. But if you’ve steadily built a solid mentor relationship, you’ll be able to rely on your mentor to support you in the future on whichever paths you’ve chosen for yourself.Written for HBR Ascend on 22 July 2019 Read my previous posts on HBR Ascend <click this>If you follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, you can download and use the sketchnote for your personal use