The advice has become almost a cliche: Find a mentor who can help you speed-learn the lessons needed to advance your career — a Yoda to instruct young Luke in the ways of the Jedi.
This is bad advice. Yes, mentors can help dramatically. But you can’t find them — they need to find you.
Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill calls it the “myth of the perfect mentor.” In this recent interview on The Root with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. she explains:
“When my MBA students come up to me and say, ‘Professor Hill, when I get to work I’m going to find a mentor, and he or she will do X, Y and Z for me.’ And I say, ‘Why would anyone do that?—they are already paying you.’”
Instead, she says, learn to be the “perfect protègè,” a person that others are attracted to and want to mentor. A perfect protege, for example, knows the value of listening over talking. “One of the things you need to be able to do is take negative feedback, because we can only learn if we get feedback from other people,” she tells Gates. If you bristle at criticism, teachers won’t want to teach you.
In her classic Harvard Business School paper from 1991, Beyond the Myth of the Perfect Mentor, she offers several ideas on mentoring that remain extremely relevant today.
- Think mentors, not mentor. “All work relationships should be understood as potential resources by which developmental needs can be addressed,” Hill wrote 20 years ago. There is likely no one single person that can help you at all stages of your career. Typical mentor-protègè relationships last two to five years.
- Not just about career. Some mentors can help you advance your career by introducing you to the right people or by acting as a buffer. But you also need psychosocial tutoring–enhancement of one’s sense of competence and effectiveness in a professional role.
- Consider development when evaluating job choices. “Seek out those positions and organizations that provide a supportive context for establishing developmental relationships,” Hill writes. “For women and minorities, it is important to be aware of the number of individuals like you in the organization, for that number will have an impact on the availability and character of developmental relationships.”
I’ll add one thought. Don’t confuse networking relationships with mentoring. We add people to our network when the relationship can be mutually beneficial, and is usually transaction oriented (I need a job reference so I’ll call Bob.) Mentoring is a deeper commitment on both sides and is not about doing favors for one another. If you want a mentor to find you, you’ll have to signal your complete commitment to the relationship.
