Hi all,
First, a quick re-intro for those of you who haven’t been subscribers since the beginning. I’m the Woo in the “To-Woo” List, Janice Woo.
I’m a finance professional (I currently lead investor relations for a private equity fund), and have worn many different hats in the industry: investment banking analyst, Chief of Staff, fintech startup business development, you name it.
I started the “To-Woo” List as a resource and outlet for my musings on career optimization and as a way to explore career coaching. In my own twisty-turny career, I’ve given a lot of thought to career optimization and along the way, have accumulated a fantastic network of people who have shared with me their struggles, challenges and ultimate insights on their journeys in making their careers more satisfying, and aligned with their values and goals.
Usually in a week, the newsletter will focus on one specific topic of career development (past versions have covered: equity compensation, quitting, weaknesses and titles), and is split into three sections:
“Musings”: my own reflections or experiences
“Conversations”: a question or chat from my network on the topic at hand
“Links”: external resources and/or a bit of levity
And I post a few random thoughts on Instagram as well @thetowoolist:
Thanks for subscribing, and if you know someone who would be interested in reading along, or has a career question or topic they want to chat about, I’d be very grateful if you’d share!
I’m going to try something a bit different this week and split the topic (“Mentors”) into two weekly newsletters, because as I learned last week, Substack has a limit on words and gifs…
So here’s what you can expect:
This week: What makes for great mentors and myths of mentorship
Next week: Looking for, and tactically creating great mentor relationships
Musings
Mentors are awesome. They can be our sherpas in navigating career and life challenges, they can serve as examples of what it’s possible to achieve, they can keep us on track and they can connect us with people to get us to where to want to go.
There’s little doubt that finding great mentors is incredibly valuable, but the question of how to find one, or what makes a mentorship great deserves some exploration.
As I did research to write this week’s newsletter on mentorship, I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of advice on ‘finding a mentor’ turns out to be… ‘pay for a mentor’. Even coaches/motivational figures that I find usually give valuable advice (Jay Shetty, a mindset coach, author and ex-monk, for one) give the advice that people should buy mentorship by hiring a coach (obviously he is biased).
I suppose there are pros to this approach:
Investing actual money in a coach implies you’ll take the commitment seriously
When you ‘shop’ for a coach, you can ensure that person is extremely tailored to your exact goals
When you pay for a coach, you eliminate the question of “why would this interesting person want to mentor me?”
I’ll admit, I haven’t pursued this path, so can’t vouch for the value of it, but for my discussion on mentorship this week, I want to focus instead on the organic kind. The kind of mentorship that evolves naturally from professional and relationships and networking (read my post on networking here).
I asked on Instagram how people found their mentors, and answers included the obvious (“they were an old boss”, “they hired me”, “my professor connected me”), as well as some surprising sources (“random fitness groups”, “another parent at my kid’s school”). Regardless of source of the relationship, or the career stage at which the relationship was formed, a few commonalities popped up that seem to lay the framework for successful, rewarding mentor relationships.
Creating great mentor relationships
Great mentor relationships require both utility and emotion. The utility component is comprised of things like credibility and tactics and answers questions like, “do I respect this person?” and “Do I admire the trajectory of their success and lives?”. The emotion component is comprised of that gut feeling: the feeling that someone seems relatable and yet aspirational, that you trust that they will look out for you, and the feeling that their approach to life is one that you want to emulate.
This is why formal or assigned mentorships don’t always work, and more than 60% of respondents from a recent study of 3,000 employees on mentorship, reveal that most mentor relationships develop naturally:
There are three common traits of really positive mentorship experiences that I’ve found in my own history, and from asking my network.
Shared values
When we meet and work with people that share our worldview, we feel the most rewarded and satisfied. Recognizing these values in someone that is ‘ahead’ of us in some way, is both a confirmation that we’re on the right track, and that by living our values, it’s possible to get where they are.
An opportunity to broadly study each other’s lives
Some of the people I first remember admiring or idolizing, were friends of my parents, or conversely, my friends’ parents. I’d get to see a wide-lens cross-section of their lives - how they were at work, how they split their time with their families and friends, how they got involved in their community, and importantly - their general demeanor and attitude.
To me, it was important not only that someone exhibited the black and white “metrics” of success, but also seemed like they were having a good time doing so. And for the one doing the mentoring, learning about their mentee’s broader life outside of work gives a glimpse into their interests and motivations. Seeing a broader swath of each others’ lives gives the emotional context to the utility part of a mentorship.
“Suffering” through something together
Ok, suffering sounds a bit dramatic, but more often than not, we bond when we work hard at something together. Connections formed at a cocktail event, or at a job fair can be fleeting. Deeper mentor relationships are more likely formed when we’re in a challenging situation together, and we can observe how people problem solve. Yes, when we see someone looking impossibly chic or successful, we’re likely to want to emulate them superficially….
… But when we see someone showing grace under fire, or working hard with a great attitude, there is something to learn from them. And from the mentor’s perspective, they are likely to be inspired by a potential mentee’s hunger, excitement or humility.
And to point #2 above, when you work long hours, or spend a significant/consistent amount of time with someone, you also are more likely to catch glimpses of the other parts of that person’s life - their home life, their other hobbies, their goals and motivations.
Putting yourself in situations where both professional and personal sides are on display, or creating situations where both sides can be on display, can help you share, and learn more about potential mentors outside of the bullets on their resume. And for mentors, don’t be afraid be vulnerable and share with your potential mentees some of the non-work challenges you’re dealing with.
Places to consider finding mentors or mentees:
Affinity groups outside of work
Alumni groups specific to your extracurricular activities
Community organizations
Friends of friends, bosses of friends, spouses of friends, parents of friends
Create a destination for people to find you and learn about your values (I’ve mentioned the concept of a ‘Serendipity vehicle’ before, but publishing content that people can easily access and share and send to others will bring likeminded connections into your orbit. It can be your Twitter, your Instagram, your LinkedIn)
Conversations
I’ve had a number of conversations this week, talking to many of you over Instagram, and to friends and colleagues about their best mentorship experiences: How they find their mentors and what made their mentors great.
Your answers made me realize how there are a lot of myths about mentorship out there, and I’d love to unpack a few below.
Mentorship Myths
Myth #1: Someone will naturally want to mentor me because I went to their school/am from their hometown
Yes, a great starting point for finding mentors is LinkedIn or the alumni contact list for your college. Finding people that (on paper) have similar backgrounds and life experiences to you suggests that there is automatic common ground, but it’s often only a starting point.
When I started my summer internship at Goldman Sachs in New York, I was a terrified 19-year-old, with barely enough courage to ask where the restrooms were located. Completely fortuitously, on the tenth day into my internship, from four rows down I overheard a loud male voice on the phone, in the midst of a muffled conversation refer to “…the Dalhousie Co-op, next to the Canadian Tire.” It was only because he mentioned not only one, but two stores in my hometown that I knew I wasn’t hallucinating. Later that week, I worked up the courage to approach him and introduce myself. “Him” turned out to be a managing director who ran asset-backed securitization for Goldman Sachs, and he turned out to be a fellow University of Calgary alum, and even more crazily, grew up in Dalhousie, a few blocks away from where I grew up.
I instantly had visions of him taking me under his wing (starting by pointing me to the restroom!), bringing me to important meetings, and blazing a trail ahead for me in my career. What were the chances that a fresh-faced, eager intern had followed the same unlikely career path from Calgary to Manhattan to work at Goldman Sachs?
While he was very kind, and certainly surprised that someone else on the floor shared in his love for “Canadian Tire money”, he was managing a massive business that was undergoing tumultuous changes (2007 was absolute chaos in the asset-backed markets that played a key part in the Great Financial Crisis), and had no time to mentor someone informally. We had a grand total of one conversation throughout my entire internship. My mentorship dreams were dashed… at least for that summer.
Five years later, I ended up reconnecting with this Managing Director over email to help organize an alumni event in New York. Through event planning and coordinate with the school’s disorganized alumni organization, (joint commiseration!) we bonded. We also discovered we shared the same values of supporting and developing the small group of our university’s alumni that had ended up in New York City, and he ultimately became a great mentor.
Myth #2: I don’t have anything to offer someone who definitionally is ‘ahead of me’
It can be daunting asking someone to mentor you. At first it seems that the “value” in a mentorship flows only in one direction - from mentOR to mentEE. It’s easy to think that someone that has many more years of experience and success than you wouldn’t get anything from a mentor relationship.
Here is a v. academic and intellectually stimulating example that proves otherwise:
When I’ve personally asked more senior individuals why they take the time out of their busy lives to spend time with mentees, they all tell me:
It’s an incredible way to learn something new - and not just a new fact here and there, but an entirely different way of thinking about the world.
Some examples below:
After I left the bank and went to a startup, I reconnected with an old boss at JPMorgan who was investing personally in early stage companies and needed advice on understanding digital marketing
A friend told me she recently reconnected with her 75 year old mentor, one of her first bosses (and retired portfolio manager), to teach him the ins and outs of cryptocurrency
To those ahead of us in our career, we are the metaphorical Kylie, aka the young, hip, fresh perspective that their metaphorical Kim needs to jazz up their mass-market clothing line (or investing perspective, or go-to-business strategy… same same).
We have a lot to offer potential mentors, not necessarily career accolades, but a fresh, creative perspective that they may not otherwise ever come across in their everyday lives.
Resources/Links
“How to Be A Good Mentor” from Purpose Driven Leadership
“What Mentoring Isn’t” - Mentors. Not to be confused with Therapists or Coaches
“Why Your Mentorship Program Isn’t Working” double-click on the study on mentorship I mention above, and reasons why formalized mentorship programs often don’t succeed
Cool Ladies Doing Cool Things: Bee Nguyen, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, is the first major Democrat to announce a bid for Georgia’s Secretary of State seat, further shifting the idea of what’s possible in Georgia and US politics
Tell Me About You
What’s an unlikely place you’ve met a mentor or mentee?
What’s a myth about mentorship you want to dispel?