Mentoring - Your Succession Plan
Some of the best advice I’ve ever received is to find a mentor (or a couple of mentors) and as you progress through your career or your career path changes utilize these people to help guide your decisions, to deflate your ego when you need it, and to help you hang in there when it’s easier to run. You never grow out of needing a mentor, executives, CEOs even the president rely on mentors to guide their decisions. In the book, “Am*bitc*hous” the author calls it finding your dream team, a group of people you can go to for professional advice, each adding their own experience and expertise to your team. Mentors are good for a lot of things, but most overlooked aspects of mentors is what you as the mentee as can do to make that relationship mutually beneficial and pay it forward.
How to be a good mentee:
- Be respectful of your mentor’s time
- Be prepared, have some topics or questions ready for your next session so you can make the most of your time
- Share information on social media or a Gen Y perspective or something that you are an expert in or can help your mentor learn more about
- Give back - volunteer for a Project Mentor program, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, or find a college student who is looking for some advice on finding his/her first job.
Inc. Magazine provides tips for finding a mentor, where CEOs turn for advice; 7 tips for finding a great mentor; why you should look past top leaders for mentors, and where you can turn for mentor “matchmaking.”
And here is a cool Inc. Magazine article on some top entreprenuers and who their mentors where (it’s an older article but pretty cool info).
If you make the most of your mentor relationships, these connections can often yield your next opportunity. So share your tips, how did you “make the ask,” engage your mentor or build a professional relationship into a mutually beneficial mentoring relationship?
Welcome! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe via email. Thanks for visiting!
Tags: Career Development, mentor, succession plan
Subscriber in a reader
Like I wrote...
August 13th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
[...] cooks spoil the meal” holds true in personal and business task/project prioritization. Yes, you should have a mentor, a financial adviser, career helper, good friends, connections and the like but just like a project [...]
August 14th, 2008 at 10:20 am
[...] spoil the meal” holds true in personal and business task/project prioritization. Yes, you should have a mentor, a financial adviser, career helper, good friends, connections and the like but just like a project [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[...] out our other posts on mentoring and decision [...]