In my life, I’ve been lucky to have had some of the most amazing mentors who challenged me along my career path and who helped shape all of my experiences. Even my parents I would consider in some ways to be mentors because they were able to instill a strong work ethic and professional value system that eventually I was able to bring into my work and throughout my career.
I’ve had leaders who I looked up to, who inspired me, who have taken their time to guide me, coach me, and help me along my career path. I think mentorship just becomes a natural extension of our work, but we ignore it sometimes. We dismiss it as just an extra part of our work. What I think we should be doing is leaning into mentorship even further and what that means is that we have to recognize explicitly that mentorship is a key responsibility that we have in our jobs and it’s a key output of our working lives.
I think this is really important because mentorship doesn’t really show up on job descriptions very often or on performance reviews. Yet mentorship can be key to putting together a highly qualified, strong team that works well together. I’ve been really lucky in my life that I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people at the very early stages of their careers. I’ve taken them on more or less as a mentor, not always explicitly but sometimes explicitly saying “I’m your mentor let us connect and work together”.
These relationships have enabled me to create different forms of reverse mentorship. They’ve given me a gift of reverse mentorship. They’ve given me insight into my own career. They’ve given me key guidance on decisions that I was trying to make. This might sound superficial or kind of blasé, but it’s really important to acknowledge that people who are at the beginning of their career can see you in a different way, in a different light, and their advice and input can be incredibly valuable for driving your career forward, for helping you avoid pitfalls, helping you avoid mistakes, and they can challenge you to rise to a better sense of self, rise to a better level of professional responsibility.
Who has mentored you? Who has taken time out of their lives, out of their professional careers to guide you along life’s path? If they have done that without any request for support or exchange, then reach out to them and say, thank you. Say “thank you for taking the time to mentor me, to take me to help me along my career path”.
Think about yourself. Who are you mentoring? Maybe not even explicitly, maybe there’s just an unwritten agreement between you and one of your colleagues that you’re going to help guide them and take care of them along their career path. Talk to them, communicate, and make sure that you’re connecting in a way that helps you both move along in your careers.
