On Mentors

I started thinking about mentoring a few weeks ago—reflecting on how I’ve experienced mentors, people who thought they were my mentors, or lived into being a mentor of sorts myself. Mentoring is an interesting beast, and probably can’t be neatly separated from supervisory roles, coaching, even friendships. I tried to think, though, about what seemed to be key elements of the best mentoring relationships I’ve been a part of. Here are some things that came to mind:

The best mentors:

1. Know more than you do about whatever it is they’re mentoring you on/in. This doesn’t mean they’re better people, or that you don’t have other knowledge they may not have. But a mentor ought to have at least a bit more knowledge, training and experience. This doesn’t always correlate to age (one way or another).
2. Have a stake in your success. Now this may not be on everyone’s mentoring list—lots of mentors don’t have much stake, but I think the best ones do. At the most basic level, this might just be that others know they are mentoring you and so if you tank, it will reflect poorly on you. Preferably, though, a good mentor will help you reach a new opportunity to level that the mentor has helped secure—and so if you fail, it will very clearly reflect on them. I don’t trust people who try to mentor me (or others) without taking a stake in their success—these people are usually just bossy/know-it-alls.
3. Don’t need you to succeed. So this may sound a bit opposite of the above point, but hear me out. The best mentors do have a stake in your success, but they do not need you to make themselves a success. They don’t need you in a co-dependent way. They mentor you out of a generous sense, perhaps a belief in your skill and a commitment to the organization (which impels them to help raise up the next generation of leaders) but they don’t need you to do their work. They don’t use you like an intern, that is.
4. Encourage (and maybe even compel) you to take the lead at times that will allow you to shine. This implies a lot of DON’Ts: they don’t talk over you, they don’t make you sit back and wait till they’re done doing the “real” work, and they certainly don’t need to make you look bad to make themselves look good. A great mentor may help feed you information in a meeting so you can be the one to share (they don’t need to, because they’re presumably already well-established). They will encourage you to identify and think through solutions. They will offer feedback, but they won’t simply tell you what to do and expect you to get in step.
5. Are not (and are not trying to be) your best friend. I guess this relates to number3—but I think the best mentors don’t mentor you because they NEED anything (other than a desire to help others, help their organization, etc.). For this reason, I suspect you will find some mentors who are helping certain people rise quickly, but who perhaps socialize with others entirely. A good, comfortable relationship is essential, but a great mentor is getting their close friendship needs met outside the mentoring relationship.

These are just a few highlights. I think a mentor could be a supervisor, and is certainly often someone in a position above you (though perhaps not directly so). And I suspect the best mentors probably had good mentors themselves—in some ways it’s like parenting I suppose—it’s easier to be a good parent if you had good ones. Not at all impossible if you didn’t, but just a lot harder. I also suspect that many people don’t like the whole mentoring thing—either because their idea of helping someone is to just tell them what to do, or because they aren’t willing to accept guidance. Being mentored requires both a submission but also some risk-taking yourself—to step into opportunities you may not yet feel ready for but which your mentor believes you are.

The truth is, none of us are self-made people, and some of the most successful people had really awesome mentors along the way. Once you have experienced a great mentor, I think you become quite impatient with bad mentors, and also quite committed yourself to being a mentor.  I also suspect that the best mentors know how to adapt for different personalities—different people need different things, and so even the above list may not be as universal as it seems to me.

What about you? What do you think are key qualities of a great mentor?