Who is your Mentor ?

 

Mentor is a person who can make a significant impact on your career or on your company, drawing on the expertise and experience that person has. Whom you choose as or who gets thrusted upon you to play a mentorship role can be a game changer for you.

It will be fun and also useful to be aware of the nuances with respect to mentor and mentorship to help you choose and benefit from mentors. The role of the mentor is not standard or same in all context. There are different roles that a mentor can play.

The mentor could bring superior subject matter expertise to help you to solve a problem or guide you through corporate web. For example, if you are trying raise funds for your new venture and if you have no prior experience in this, a mentor who may have had extensive exposure as a venture capitalist can be a great help in dealing with multiple service providers and to get the best possible deal. Or if you are considering organisation wide computerisation, someone who have lived through this transformation could help you to be ready for challenges on the way.

The mentor could offer references and endorsements with people of influence and relevance for your growth through his/her network. For example, when you are raising funds, some one who have dealt multiple investors and have had the experience to understand the agenda of the diverse players could help you to refine your investment pitch and may even give reference to different investors.

The mentor could be someone could act as a sounding board for your ideas and provide a philosophical foundation for your initiatives and decisions.  For example, someone who has had good experience in guiding organisational growth could help you in your process of developing alternate growth strategies, evaluating them and make a choice.

While a good mentor may be a mix of all, very often the larger focus may be in a few roles based on their comfort and your priorities.  A genuine mentor with appropriate experience and right intention can make a big difference to you and your company. They can add significant value in helping you to evolve strategies, guide your team, select better tools, turbocharge your marketing and magnify your public relation. Therefore. it will be great for any company to have a mentorship program established as it can contribute to its overall development through development and retention of good managers.

While we give due attention when working with a mentor there is another important dimension, we should be conscious of when choosing and or working with a mentor.

Ideally a mentor would be a person who has achieved certain stature and/ or position that he plays the role of a mentor as a giver and not a taker. Let us go a little deeper on the difference between giver and taker. The giver is a person who has more to give to the mentee. They are self-confident and will work with you to bring the best out of you and also not try to usurp the credit for your achievement, but help you to grow in your role. They will spent time to understand your context, the opportunities available, challenges you face, the strategies your following and proposing and identify your weaknesses and will give you considered advice. They will help you to track progress and act as a sounding board to help you to continuously refine your way forardy

The takers are those who act or pretend to act as your mentor, primarily to enhance their agenda. They will manage to make you doubt yourself and make it look like you are surviving on their ideas. The worst is when often they have nothing really to offer. They are too impatient to understand your context, your challenges, your option and their merits and weaknesses.  They will ask you about all your thoughts and make general comments and motherhood statements with no real value addition and at best may keep goading you to up your aspirations with no suggestions or input or support to make it happen. If you end up succeeding, they will go around announcing to the whole world that your success is courtesy their idea.

You have to be mindful of such people when you choose your mentors independent of their stature and position so that you don’t end up with the latter category. Very often they are in this position because they are better at managing their environment and more than willing to sell their souls for a price. For them end justifies the means with ‘end’ defined as maximising personal agenda. They are too happy to live off the hard work of the doers and smart in edging out the doers in due course like the pirates. (Read this post https://rollingstone-revelations.blogspot.com/2012/05/some-people-all-time-humour.html for a light hearted depiction of such mentors)

Sometimes they are thrusted upon you as advisors, or consultants or directors with you having no choice. Then you will have to have your strategy to protect you from them or manage them and may be the  support of another genuine mentor who will help you in your attempt for self-preservation.

C’est la vie!

“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” Oprah Winfrey – Host, Producer, Author & Philanthropist