Every stage in your career progress requires new skills. Sometimes, the knowledge you need to acquire is technical minutiae that can best be learned with a more experienced practitioner at your elbow. At other times, you need advice about developing business skills, or help deciding which new position to accept. Such advice can be acquired haphazardly, or it can come from a mentoring relationship.
However, finding a suitable mentor or mentee and making the relationship work isn't always easy, particularly for women who are shy about asking for assistance. Executive women in IT who have learned from mentors or who have provided such guidance themselves urge others to get involved, no matter where they are on their career path. In this article, successful women share what makes a mentoring relationship work, how to find the right person and how to know when to part.
The Benefits of Mentoring Go Both Ways
Mentoring is worth the energy expended, both for an executive who offers guidance and for the person who listens. Everyone interviewed for this article who had mentoring relationships (as mentor, mentee or both), speaks warmly of the experience and cites personal and professional abilities gained.
For the mentee, the real value of mentoring comes from the opportunity to gain confidence as well as skills. "It's a relationship with someone who allows you to voice your vulnerabilities, coach you on strategies to overcome them and help you see possibilities you might have missed otherwise," says Diane Wallace, CIO of the Connecticut Department of Information Technology.
The career benefits can be significant for the mentor, too. Mandeep Maini, vice president of healthcare systems marketing and web systems delivery at Blue Cross/Blue Shield, says executives should "Mentor to learn, rather than to teach." Mentoring makes you reflect on your own style, prejudices and shortcomings, she says, and encourages soul searching.
Mentoring has also made Maini a more compassionate and inclusive leader. A mentee from another department was nervous about speaking up in meetings-a difficulty that Maini personally never had. Coaching her mentee through her fears caused Maini to recognize that someone in her own department who doesn't speak up may be holding back out of shyness, rather than out of a lack of things to say. So Maini is now more inclined to solicit the meeting participant's opinion, where she wouldn't have done so previously.
What's more, mentors say they derive a sense of satisfaction from helping the next generation gain the skills they need. Connecticut's Wallace counts all the successful managers and leaders she's mentored who went on to bigger and better assignments as one of her greatest achievements. "I'm still in touch with employees who I haven't worked with in years, but who still choose to call me a friend because I helped mentor them at some point," she says.
The benefits are evident no matter where you stand on the job ladder-and it's particularly valuable for executives, says Maini, since it's lonely at the top. Executives rarely want to express uncertainty since it makes others think they can't do the job. Yet, Maini points out, we all have fears and insecurities and need to talk with someone.
Linda Brigance, vice president and CIO of FedEx's Asia Pacific Division, appreciates someone who can provide guidance. "I had a mentor even as I moved into my role as CIO in Asia, which provided me with the comfort and confidence that I could talk with someone I trusted as I was establishing myself in this role."
Mentoring Nuts & Bolts
Those who have never sought a mentor may be unsure how it works day-to-day or be unclear about the specifics of such relationships.
The short answer, of course, is that a mentoring relationship can work any way that satisfies the participants. That being said, a typical mentoring relationship consists of an agreement to work together for a period of time, such as six to nine months, with hour-long phone calls or video conferences once a month. Wallace recommends that mentees share their résumé, long-term career development objectives and what they hope to accomplish through the mentoring relationship prior to the first meeting.
Wallace also suggests that the mentee itemize current performance objectives that will influence her career and three challenges in her development process. "These documents then become the basis of the first conversation in establishing how the mentor can help the mentee," says Wallace.
Typical discussion topics include challenges in the mentee's current job (such as a difficult project or clash with a superior or peer) or a family/work balance issue with which the individual is wrestling. "The point of these conversations is to have a safe place to discuss issues and get a new, unbiased perspective on how to handle them."
Be prepared, says Wallace, and schedule a conversation when it's convenient for the mentor. "If you haven't worked for them before, you want to approach them on an issue of mutual interest. If that initial conversation goes well, ask if you can seek their advice on other issues," she says. "Mentoring conversations don't need to take an hour; 10 to 15 minutes can be a lot of time if you're prepared and can get to the point."
The result of such conversations is both tactical-better ways to do your job-and strategic. When asked what she got from mentoring, Charlotte Klock, executive director of IT infrastructure at the University of California-San Diego identified several reoccurring themes, such as "pick your battles" and "it's OK to take risks."
Would she have learned these lessons otherwise? "Probably, but I would have burned a lot of bridges in doing so and created a bunch of work that wasn't necessary."
Finding a Mentor or Mentee
It's common for people to find their mentors from an existing work relationship, such as the boss who continues to offer advice. Others prefer to get their guidance from elsewhere in the organization or from outside the company to avoid departmental politics.
Clearly, both approaches can work, but the important point is to find someone from whom you can learn. "Look to people who embody the characteristics you aspire to develop," says Maini. Brigance recommends identifying role models: individuals for whom you have the most respect because of their actions and decisions as professionals.
You also want to make sure you can relate to your mentor or mentee. For Suzanne Montague, CIO and vice president for IT at University of Texas at Arlington's Office of Information Technology, compatibility is most important. "I think there needs to be an alignment of business philosophies," she says.
"This includes an agreement on business priorities, goals, strategies, tactics and beliefs. I have seen many situations where a possible mentoring relationship started to bud, then lost momentum due to a misalignment in one of these critical areas."
Don't be shy about asking a would-be mentor if she'd be interested in helping you. Most people are honored to be asked, says Maini; after all, who can resist the flattery of being told she's a role model?
"The most successful mentor-mentee relationships usually occur when a colleague or associate has reached out to me proactively," says FedEx's Brigance.
"When this happens, it clearly demonstrates to me that this person is deeply interested in expanding their knowledge, experience and appetite for growth."
Adds Klock, senior managers always have an opportunity to provide mentoring, even when the recipient isn't consciously aware of the nature of the guidance. You can show how to conduct meetings, work one-on-one with your staff, or decide how much risk to take.
When you look for someone to mentor or from whom to get mentoring, it's far more important to concern yourself with a match of skills and interests than with whether the mentor is a man or a woman. You do need to be comfortable with the individual, and maybe that means you'll lean towards one or the other-but it's far from the primary criteria.
Women interviewed for this story say gender usually is not an issue. Gender plays no role in a successful mentoring relationship, says Brigance, who adds that she has had excellent male and female mentors and that she has mentored both men and women. "What matters is that both the mentor and mentee have mutual respect for each other."
Pamela Rucker, vice president of IT at PSC, which provides nationwide industrial services, environmental services, transportation and container services, agrees that a gender match isn't critical but emphasizes that it be appropriate. "Having a woman who understands what it's like to be the only female at the table in an executive setting helps you relate on a different level," she says. "There's an unspoken camaraderie that comes from a person sharing your same background."
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