Episode 28 - Do I Need a Professional Mentor

Craig P. Anderson (00:19):

Welcome to Q and A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Craig Anderson and I'm Lou Quinto. Today we're going to be talking about mentoring. We've spent some time in the past talking about coaching, but today we're going to speak on another area of where you can get help to grow your career, which is mentoring. And as we always do, we're going to cover three areas as part of our discussion today. One, what's different between a mentor and a coach and you know, why, why does that matter to, how do you go about finding a mentor? They don't just, you know, people just don't kind of walk up to you and say, Hey, I want to be your mentor. So how do you find one? And then three, kind of establishing guidelines for the relationship. Like any good relationship, you want to make sure you have good rules of engagement. And so we'll give you some ideas about that. So let's kick off the first one, Lou, why don't you lead us into mentoring versus coaching?

Lou Quinto (01:03):

Yeah, mentor versus coach, it's, it's mentors usually are free coaching coaches and not free. That's one good re that's one good distinction between the two. But a mentor is more like, yeah. And I can say from the boomer age, you know, it's that Sage, it's a person you go to for advice, you share things with that person and get them to give you their insight on something and perhaps maybe how they would have done something differently or how they would would've changed something in order to get things done. It's almost like having a, a board of trustee. And this is one of your board of directors where they're just giving you advice. They're on policy, they're not getting into the management and things like that where the coach on the other hand, coaches the one who's running up and down and on the sideline screaming and yelling you it as you are performing. So I would say the coaches is probably a consistent advice giver and reflection person get you to look in the mirror where the mentor more is, stands off on the side and you meet with that person on just the quarterly your basis and just sharing things with them. Not only business but life too.

Craig P. Anderson (02:15):

Yeah. Yeah. I think the mentor relationship is very different from coaching. Right. Coaching is in the mentor is different from consulting to does that matter, right? The coach is really helping you kind of clarify and achieve your goals and help you deal with the obstacles that you're doing. But the mentor may actually step in to help you kind of figure out what those goals are and say, you know, Hey, when I was where you are, I was thinking about this but this, you know, these are some of the things you might consider that my experience showed me. I ran into, let me share with you the benefit of my experience. And so the mentor is kind of like, you know, the coach is not going to take you out for a beer. No. The mentor, you're probably going to go out for a beer and talk through stuff.

Craig P. Anderson (02:49):

And that's kind of, you know, it's a weird difference. But I think that's kind of the key difference. The coaching is more of a distant professional relationship. You're very engaged, but the Mentor is closer, friendship, and kind of that guiding hand that helps you through some of the things they may sometimes act like and consultant and give you advice. But I think they're really trying to kind of help you grow. Take back the big picture of kind of what are the goals I want to set for my life or for my business. Then the coach can come in and help you kind of work through how to achieve some of those on a more specific level. So, you know, that's how I see this.

Lou Quinto (03:20):

Yeah. Yeah. In, in the Italian neighborhood, it's your godfather.

Craig P. Anderson (03:23):

They're your mentor. There you go. Yeah. Obi wan Kenobi. So the next thing we're going to cover is finding a mentor. Lou, you know, what do you, what are you looking for when you're finding a mentor?

Lou Quinto (03:32):

Well, one of the things you want to look at is, is one, it's always good if they're, if they do something that professionally is very close to what you're doing. Doesn't need to be the exact profession, but you need to someone who has the idea of the profession that you're in the career that you're in because they'll, their advice will probably be more stable in some ways. However it, I'm gonna turn it around, be a little political and say sometimes it's not bad to get a mentor who isn't, knows nothing about your business and is able to really take an objective view of what you're doing. And when you ask questions, give you some answers that are from outside and get you to think about some things. So I played both sides of the coin on that one. I apologize. But I would say first find someone who at least has an understanding of what you're doing and then there's no reason why you shouldn't have more than one mentor.

Craig P. Anderson (04:24):

Right. And it's interesting, I have a coaching client and her company actually offers a very far, it's a very large international company. And they offer a mentoring program and it's actually almost like a matching service where you put in some information about yourself, the people who are available to the network. Yes, I'd left her side. Right. Depending on what you want. But no, they actually, so they kind of get you started, started to match up, give you the best possible matches and then you can kind of do interviews with those people. Yeah. And she's taken a really interesting approach because she's more on the business side, the accounting side, and she's trying to figure out, you know, do I want that or do I want to mentor from an area I don't know. Then maybe can help me think of where I want to go. Cause she's pretty early on in her career and may have an opportunity switch into more of a business side versus a back office side of the business. So she's kind of saying, all right, where am I needed just some value in it for me to kind of look for someone outside of strictly accounting or do I want to look for someone in accounting at this phase. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting, I think I applaud companies that are really trying to find ways to help their employees find mentors.

Lou Quinto (05:24):

Yeah. Yeah. And there are very few companies that have formula form, formal mentoring type programs. The other place to find mentors is just networking is make sure in through your networking, if you find someone that piques your interest and they've been successful in you, think that's someone that you would like to develop a mentor, mentee relationship with to get their advice on some different things. It would be a great way to get if you don't have a formal one. Okay. There you go. All right. The third area that we're going to talk about is establishing some guidelines with this mentor. Obviously we talked about at the beginning, you know, the difference between a coach and a mentor. One of the first things you do with the coaches, you set up guidelines. How are we going to communicate, how often we're going to do it?

Lou Quinto (06:07):

With the mentor, you want to make sure what one, they're not getting paid. Going back to the big difference between a mentor and a coach. So you need to be able to respect their time and they need to respect your time too. And so what you want to do is you want to establish boundaries when it comes to time, when it comes to how often you're going to meet when it comes to, if you want your mentor to look at perhaps some sort of document that you've prepared a report or something and giving them the time to be able to do that to go through it as opposed to I need it tomorrow. Can we meet tomorrow? And so in developing that relationship, you really want to make sure that you're considering time and you're considering how often you're going to meet and then any of the other ancillary relationship types of things that may come into place, but they need to be established up.

Craig P. Anderson (06:59):

Right? No, I agree. I mean, it's much more of an informal relationship than hiring or salting or hiring a coach or you're paying for their availability and you're paying for them to do certain things for you. So I think kind of rolling it back to say, all right, this is, you know, more of a collegial type thing, more of a, you know, friendships probably too loose of a term, but you wouldn't want to take up all their time.

Lou Quinto (07:17):

No. And you wouldn't want to send them a text message at two in the morning saying, you know, Hey, what do you think about this? Because then that definitely would be getting into there.

Craig P. Anderson (07:26):

Yeah. That's not the kind of mentoring I want to do. I worry enough about my [inaudible].

Lou Quinto (07:30):

I was going to in the morning, I was going to say, we both have kids.

Craig P. Anderson (07:33):

Yeah. So very good. Excellent. Well, Lou, what are your [inaudible]

Lou Quinto (07:37):

Key takeaways from this? It key takeaways is, is one of the things with a mentor, if you don't have one, you should, you should go find one because that's that safe space for that person to just bounce things off of a w when it comes to your goals, when it comes to what you, what you're doing, what you want to do. And someone that's going to give you some advice that again, you're not paying for this advice. They can't stress that enough. And so sometimes when you're not paying for that advice and it's more of that collegial relationship you take that advice to heart, particularly if this is a mentor that's not only a mentor when it comes to your professional life, but also a little bit on your personal life too, because the two do coincide continually, particularly if you have a young family and you have kids you need to, your time is limited. And so when it comes to the mentor, [inaudible] find someone that you, you trust. And that's what I'm going to say. Someone you trust.

Craig P. Anderson (08:32):

Trust. And I think my key takeaway is the mentors and other key relationship that you want to have in your professional life. Right? So there's a role to have a mentor working with you. There's a role for a coach and there's a role for a consultant and really is you're trying to advance your company and grow your, grow yourself, grow your company. It's really important to get people in key roles and get that support structure in place. And a lot of people don't, you know, we, we kind of talk about mentors. We spent a lot of time more here about coaching and consulting, but I think it's kind of that well-rounded kind of board of advisors that you build in your life is what's going to help you succeed more quickly through. So, and that goes back to, yeah, you don't have to have just one mentor, right?

Craig P. Anderson (09:08):

You can have more than one mentor. And it could be for different aspects of your, your life. Again, that board of directors. Yes, absolutely. All right, well thanks for joining us on this episode of Q and A On Breakthrough Leadership. If you enjoy our content, please like it, share it with your friends, and subscribe to our channel over on YouTube or subscribe to the feed over on QAleadership.com

 And if it's hard for you to watch the videos but that you would like to listen to it online, we're also available as a podcast forum on all your favorite platforms, so be sure to check us out there. So until next time, I'm Craig Anderson and I'm Lou Quinto.