You need a mentor, not your mentor's tick in the box

“Do you have a mentor?” How many times have you been asked this question? Chances are, if you work in a big 500 fortune corporation, you’ve heard this question more than once. It is also very possible, that your answer to that question was something on the lines of “No, I don’t have a mentor. How can I get a mentor? Who can be my mentor?” And then it is very possible that the answer to your question was “let me get back to you with some ideas” and then you will never hear again from the person that asked you the big mentorship question on the first place.

I was asked the mentor question many times in my career. As a female petroleum engineer, I was always looking for other females who had followed my career path and succeeded. I can genuinely say, I never met one of them. Yes there were a few brilliant women out there, but they were pretty unreachable members of the board or frankly speaking, women too busy to lend a mentoring hand to a younger version of themselves.

So you work in a giant corporation where your colleagues are mostly men, your boss is a man, and his boss is a man, and the boss of his boss is a man, and so on and so on and so on. You see no women on your path. You wonder how you are ever going to make it through that maze of testosterone. You want to ask that woman on the board how she did it and when you finally manage to ask her the one million dollar question, you tell yourself you could have read that answer in the self help section of Cosmopolitan.

Then you do the reasonable thing. You cannot create a female mentor out of thin air, so you do what you have to do: you look for a good mentor in the male world. And there are plenty of good ones. (This article works under the assumption that you work in a huge corporation where you are a woman, and you know that before you, other women are reaching not the glass but the reinforced concrete ceiling).

I will share with you the strategy that I followed. I needed a mentor. My career was not going anywhere. I worked hard to make it. I was smart, I was ambitious, I wanted to succeed. However I was not very political. It was a game that I found hard to play. And I knew how much men around me loved that game and how good they were at it. So I wanted to find someone to help me develop the skills to learn to play that game. So I mustered my courage and sent a note to a very powerful and bright man of my company, in a very high position and with the best credentials. I’ve seen him before in action, I found him ruthless and the perfect alpha male in a men’s world. I thought I had it made, I could learn anything I needed to learn from him.

However, I went to meet him, several times, and he was too busy, that the little time I had to talk to him every couple of months, were never enough to even scratch the surface of my biggest issues. Yes I had a mentor, I really did. I still resigned from my company months later out of frustration and desperation over not being able to move forward.

Time passed and I have moved on. Emotionally detached of the situation, I can clearly analyze it now, and I come to realize that a real mentor must possess a series of qualities:

1. A real mentor has time for you. He/she was a person just like you and understands that you are seeking him/her for advice and this is not a five minute job.

2. A real mentor has trust and believes in you. Some mentors can see you as a way to fulfill their political aspirations. Trust me, mentoring is in their agenda. Mentoring somebody is one of the conditions of wannabe leaders so you may end up being mentored by someone who is ticking a box in his/her career progression. A real mentor believes in who you are, he/she can see you as a rough diamond and is willing to trust in your ability to flourish and shine.

3. A real mentor is a master. You want to be mentored by someone who is very knowledgeable about your business. Someone who has gone through many different experiences so he/she can help you see a holistic view of your business. Ideally, your mentor has mastered a subject in an area in which you aspire to steer your career.

4. A real mentor is a teacher. Your mentor must be able to teach you in pretty much the same way that your school teachers did. Someone who will not fear that you are there to take their job and someone who will guide you, open your eyes to what is available, awaken your senses to new opportunities, stimulate you to research the unknown, congratulate you in your victories, reprimand you when you are slacking off, help you go back in track when you are drifting away.

5. A real mentor is honest. He/she will speak to you with the truth. It may not be the universal truth, it does not mean that what he/she says must be true for you, but you want someone who is really honest with you, someone who can provide any type of feedback in an honest manner. Forget about constructive polite feedback; leave that to your boss and colleagues. Your mentor should be able to speak to you candidly. Only you and your guts will tell you how honest he/she is being with you.

After years of battling the mentoring question, I have come to realize that I had a couple of great mentors that I did not recognize as such until recently. They gathered all the qualities that I have mentioned above, but I was so wrapped up with the idea of a mega important and super powerful and high profile man in the business, that I lost sight of the equally important people, though not so powerful and recognized that I could have looked for as mentors. I owe so much of the woman that I have become to those “low profile” men and women who accompanied me throughout the years.

It may be that you are looking for a mentor. It may be that someone has asked you to become their mentor. What really matters is that mentoring can change a life for good. It is a powerful opportunity to demonstrate your humanity and through your actions, change a life and a change the world.

Dedicated to my mentor and great friend Tames Visser, who is now mentoring many from heaven.