Navigating Professional Growth: Leveraging the Power of Mentorship
At times, professional growth can feel a bit like playing Minesweeper. You’re not sure which choices to make, what boxes to mark, or which ones are ultimately going to explode in your face. Fortunately, you don’t have to play Minesweeper alone. This is where mentors come into play.
I’ve been lucky enough to have some fantastic mentors throughout my professional journey, and even more fortunate to mentor several individuals myself. It’s worth a few minutes to share some steps you can take to ensure you get the most out of your relationship with your mentor.
Set Clear Goals and Expectations
If you’re lucky enough to have already found your mentor, your next step is to outline what you hope to achieve. Without clear goals, it’s very difficult to stay focused on your career growth or measure your progress. I like to start out with these questions for all of my mentees:
Brief Overview: Prepare a short explanation of your career or business, less than five minutes long. Explain it like you would to a new customer or family member.
Vision and Success Metrics: What is the end goal for your business or career? How do you envision measuring success along the way? This could be in terms of titles, salaries, revenue, social impact, innovation, etc.
Current State Snapshot: Prepare a quick overview of where your business is at or where you are professionally at this moment. This might include your customer base, team size, or any milestones you’ve achieved.
Challenges and Resource Gaps: Identify the top three challenges you’re facing, including any specific resources or skills you feel you or your business is lacking.
Recent Wins: Identify a couple of recent successes in your career or business. This will help your mentor understand what is currently working and what is important to you.
The answers to these questions have been super helpful for me, as a mentor, to better understand where you are in your journey and your destinations.
Be Proactive and Engaged
I've worked with a few people who didn’t come prepared to our first meeting with any of the initial questions answered, or they have no-showed for scheduled calls or meetings. As a mentor, this can be very disheartening. If you are going to be late or need to reschedule, let your mentor know.
Your mentor has protected blocks of time on their calendar to meet with you, so make sure to show them that this time is valuable to you as well.
Be Open to Feedback and Willing to Learn
A good mentor will provide you with feedback on your career or business choices, and not all of it will be pleasant. A good mentor should be able to communicate in terms of opportunities for improvement, as opposed to problems or mistakes, but it can still be rough and make you feel like they are calling your baby ugly.
The role of a mentor is to help improve your current situation or guide you around difficult choices. They have a different perspective and different life experiences—that’s why you have them there. They’re not providing feedback to hurt you or condemn you; they’re sharing their opinions to ultimately help your career and business grow.
Take Responsibility for Your Progress
You should come to each session with your mentor with notes and stories about what feedback you’ve acted on and how well it worked (if at all). The feedback from a mentor isn’t always going to be 100% perfect. If they gave feedback you tried that didn’t pan out, let them know so they can provide better guidance in the future. Conversely, if there’s feedback that was really helpful and insightful, share that too. We can learn from both successes and failures.
Mentorship is a symbiotic relationship. You get the opportunity to learn from someone with experience in your field, helping make your career or business journey much smoother. As a mentor, I get the chance to help others avoid or overcome obstacles I faced during my own periods of growth.
