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Growth Through Mentorship: How to Be a Great Mentee & Mentor
Growth Through Mentorship: How to Be a Great Mentee & Mentor
Mentorship is an underrated and underdeveloped skill for growth, development, and leadership. As a mentor, it's hard to develop the leadership skills you need to mentor with purpose and passion. As a mentee, how do you know what questions to ask and skills to work on to reach your goals?
A huge thank you to Catalyst for sponsoring and Junan Pang, Mary Poppen, and Haley Miller for participating as panelists. These three amazing panelists gave us tactics to put in place ASAP to make our professional relationships stronger and more meaningful, to yield successful mentorships.
We took a deep dive into the following topics:
Discussion topics
Why to invest in mentorship, and the benefits of being a mentor
How to be a great mentee and great mentor
Common mentorship challenges
How to get started finding your next mentor/mentee
Key TAkeaways
How to pick the right mentor: What do you want to work on as a priority? What do you need a mentor on/for? Define your goals, identify your role models, and recognize that you can have mentors for different avenues and specific challenges. Find out more!
Mentee preparedness: It’s on the mentee to drive the relationship. Have an agenda for your meetings, determine how you will measure your goals, and figure out how your mentor can benefit from the relationship as well.
Resources for finding a good mentor: Look geographically/where you’re based, internally within your company, by interest/groups like Women in Customer Success. Use your resources like LinkedIn, newsletters, conferences and associations. What organization is doing your interest/challenge really well? Who can be a mentor from that organization?
Evaluating your mentorship: Part of a mentorship is determining when to stop the mentoring, how to find the right cadence, and how to take more out of your mentorship. Assess whether the mentorship is still working for you and be honest about how to make it more valuable for the both of you.
Becoming a mentor: The reality is, you probably already have been a mentor without realizing it. Anytime you're sharing knowledge or experience with a new hire or with a friend, or giving advice, you're mentoring. Whenever you have something to contribute to someone who doesn't have the same knowledge or expertise as you, it’s a good time to start mentoring.