There is no debating this: Mentors make a difference to your career. “Studies show that good mentoring can lead to greater career success, including promotions, raises and increased opportunities.” (Forbes, January 20, 2019)
According to data from a CNBC/SurveyMonkey survey, 90 percent of employees with a career mentor are happy at work. Big companies are paying attention: 100 percent of the Fortune 50 have mentoring programs and 84 percent of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs. (Forbes, May 19, 2022).
But how do you find a mentor if you are not working for one of these progressive giants with a mentoring program? Once you have been through the basic mentoring process in a company with a mentoring program, how do you find other mentors – different mentors who can help you develop new skills and help you uncover new insights into your career?
Many people I have spoken with over the years have found the prospect of finding mentors challenging. “How do I do this? I don’t feel comfortable going up to a senior leader and asking them, ‘Will you be my mentor?,’” said a senior IT auditor with four years of work experience in a Fortune 1000 company.
And those instincts were right. That’s not the way to initiate a mentoring relationship. So how does this mentoring thing work, anyway?
Let’s start at the beginning. When are mentors most helpful to your career? Many people find mentors incredibly helpful in the early years of their career when they are learning the ropes of their job – not only the technical skills, but also, how to talk and present, how to negotiate tricky interpersonal situations, how to decipher the unspoken protocol of an organization, and a big bugaboo for so many of us: office politics.
Once we have found our footing, we might feel that we don’t need mentoring quite as much. We are in a groove in our careers. Then comes a fork in the road: A job with a new company or the bid for a promotion. Once again, a mentor will be valuable in navigating these new waters.
Climbing up into leadership requires a shift from a tactical, day-to-day execution role to a strategic one. Making that leap is often achieved more easily and successfully with a mentor – or a team of mentors that help us address different aspects of leadership and management, not to mention the increasingly complex internal politics.
The need for mentors never really goes away. There may be periods in your career when a mentor isn’t essential to your growth, but inevitably the time will come when you need a mentor.
Before you go on the hunt, ask yourself, are you actually ready to be mentored?
Before looking for a mentor, think hard about whether you are ready to be mentored and ready to invest in the relationship. Being a mentee isn’t sitting at the foot of a mentor and having them impart wisdom. The mentor is offering their valuable time and hard-won wisdom; these are gifts that you acknowledge and express gratitude for not just with words, but by your attitude and your actions.
Being a great mentee means being open-minded, ready to change, dedicated to preparing ahead of time for sessions with your mentor, and committed to following through on goals or projects established with your mentor.
How do you prepare? Know what skill or competency you are looking to build, or the question you need help with. Before the meeting, send an email with a subject line that succinctly telegraphs the topic of the meeting and outlines what you’d like to discuss. This ensures that valuable time during your meeting won’t be wasted on laying out why you are there, and it gives your mentor time to prepare as well.
Next, prepare for the meeting itself. Detail the steps you have already taken to build the skill or answer the question yourself. What has worked? What didn’t work? What are some strategies that might work that you can present to your mentor for their input?
Doing the upfront work will make any mentoring meeting more productive, and it will demonstrate to your mentor that you are serious about improving and respectful of their time and input.
Once you have met with a mentor, it’s critical to actually do “the homework,” meaning that you are going to run with the ideas and strategies discussed in your mentoring session and try them out. You’ll want to take notes on your progress so that you’ll be able to report back and further deepen your knowledge and your relationship with your mentor. They are getting to know and understand you through these interactions.
Very importantly, mentors are typically helpful people by definition, and they WANT to know how you are getting on. They have offered up thoughts and advice, and would like to know if it helped, and what progress you have made. Your updates and feedback are a very important part of reciprocating in the relationship.
The bottom line: Mentoring is not to be undertaken lightly. It’s a two-way street and you have to be ready to invest by being thoughtful, proactive and communicative and by following through.
If you are ready to do all that, then it’s time to start the search for mentors. What makes a good mentor?
Mentors are typically people further along in their careers who have skills, expertise and experience that you can learn from. A mentor might be a more senior peer, it could be your boss, or your boss’ boss, or an experienced leader or SME in another functional area. Usually, you find mentors within your own organization, but there are times when going further afield will make sense. A cool thing to know, if you haven’t discovered this already, is that ISACA has a mentoring program that you can participate in.
Who you look for depends on what you are trying to learn. Your primary task is to identify what you need to learn, and then find a person with that expertise who is open to sharing their knowledge. Chemistry is also important. Find someone you can talk with comfortably and with whom you can feel at ease.
Trust is a critical component of a mentoring relationship. This next statement will ring true to everyone in digital trust: It takes time to develop trust. That’s why mentoring relationships are generally not instantaneous. The trust in a mentoring relationship needs to go both ways.
You may be sharing information that you would like to have kept between you and your mentor. You need to know that you can trust them to do that. On the other side of the equation, your mentors are trusting you to be respectful of the time they invest in you, and that you will safeguard any confidential information they entrust to you.
We demonstrate our trustworthiness through our actions. Observe potential mentors in a variety of situations and assess their professional reputation (internally and/or externally). Your objective is to ensure you feel confident that a mentor is someone you can both learn from and trust. And, make no mistake, they will be doing the same with you!
Where should you look for a mentor?
In talking with people about how they found their mentors, there were a few common themes:
- They had worked with the person on a project at work.
- The mentor was a go-to person for a particular area of interest or skill development.
- The mentor was an internal client and they had established a good relationship over time.
- They met via a volunteer day at work.
- They met through an affinity group at work.
- They met through a professional group.
What all these things have in common is that the connection happened organically in settings that fostered a way for people to connect in the natural way that people connect. The meeting was not forced.
Tip: Look for settings that appeal to you and where you can meet new people (and potential mentors!), engage with them, and allow your work and personality to shine.
A cybersecurity director at a major financial services company said that one of the most productive ways she had met people who later became mentors was by setting up meet-and-greets and informational interviews with people in other departments. “Strive to learn how their function relates to the company overall or to their own team; this is always a quick way to build a relationship with someone.”
However, it wasn’t like the person just met the person – there seemed to be some chemistry, and BOOM, they had a mentor. It took time and repeated exposure to develop the relationship.
A consultant at a major management consulting company told me that she had developed a cadre of mentors by finding a senior person on each of her projects that she could talk with and seek advice from as the project progressed. During the course of her multi-month projects, these senior people had the chance to get to know her and see the quality of her work. Once the project had finished, she stayed in touch, fostering the relationship. She now has a “team” of five mentors who know her and her work, and are ready to mentor her as other questions or development needs arise.
In Office, Remote, Hybrid …
Many of the people I have spoken with about their experiences with mentors noted that it was much easier to develop relationships in face-to-face settings. When work largely went remote, it took more effort and planning to build connections. One couldn’t just ask a question in the hallway after a meeting or casually drop by someone’s office for a quick chat.
An IT audit supervisor I spoke with said that he had made it a practice while working remotely of keeping his camera on during meetings. He did this to stay in the sightlines of his leadership, mentors and potential mentors. He also noted that he was able to build better connections with seniors and staff who sought him out for mentoring when they, too, kept their cameras on.
With work environments still in flux after the titanic shift prompted by the pandemic, it will take some creativity to figure out the best methods for building connections with potential mentors and fostering organic relationships. Good things to consider will be the culture of your workplace and the preferred communication and interaction styles of your potential mentors.
A tip for early-career professionals is to capitalize on the time when you are in the office to talk with people in person. Several managers noted that their staff often send emails or Slack messages rather than walking down the hall (or across the building) to talk face-to-face with a client or colleague. They characterized it as a habit that had really taken hold with the pandemic. Their concern was the reduced opportunities for valuable person-to-person connections that build trust and help people build beneficial relationships, including mentoring relationships. The watchword was don’t “hide” behind email, get out there and be seen and known.
Wrapping up, this was a short course on how to make mentoring part of your career toolkit. Working with mentors is what successful professionals do because great careers aren’t built in a vacuum. There is just too much to know; too many decisions to make along the way. We keep ourselves from wasting time, making poor career choices, and learning the hard way by engaging with mentors.
There are many ways to find mentors, and ISACA offers you both its mentoring program and myriad opportunities to meet with potential mentors through your local chapter events and global conferences. And, once you’ve experienced the magic of mentoring, consider becoming a mentor yourself. Not only will you learn things yourself through the experience, but also you will be rewarded by seeing others grow and succeed. It’s a beautiful thing.