A really common bit of advice you hear throughout your career is to get a mentor: somebody who’s more experienced than you who can help you out with any questions or career problems. And this is pretty easy advice, because many professionals want a mentor! But there isn’t a lot of guidance on how to effectively use one, so today we’re going to talk about making the most of your mentorship – as a mentee.

🤔 Choosing the right mentor(s)

Finding the right mentor match for you can take some time. You might have multiple mentors at any time, and you will probably find that what you need from a mentor changes as you progress through your career.

Generally speaking, if you’re in an IC (individual contributor) or early-level manager role, you’d be looking for a mentor who’s in the same career as you and a couple of levels above you. That means they’re far enough ahead of you to give some decent advice, but not so far ahead that they’ve forgotten the struggles you’re dealing with.

👀 The dangers of someone who’s too far ahead of you.

When I was just months into my marketing career, I got matched in a mentorship program with a woman who was a Global Head of Marketing for a major brand. It was really cool until we realised she effectively couldn’t help me because she was so far away from what my real problems were. She would’ve been perfect for someone who needed advice on dealing with a global C-suite of stakeholders, not for a university student who was trying to figure out how to use the EDM software.

If you want to think about this a bit more, I recommend reading through this article I wrote some months ago about the peer network you need to build.

⌛️ Finding the right match might take time.

When you’re looking for a mentor, the chemistry component really matters, which is how well you get along. If you don’t like talking to them, disagree frequently, or don’t really respect their advice, both of you are really wasting your time. So if you aren’t feeling it, there’s no obligation to keep a partnership going.

📝 Come prepared

Before you see your mentor, you should have an idea of what you want to get out of the meeting. In mentorship relationships, the mentee is always in charge of driving the conversation. Depending on your style, this can be as structured as having a long list of questions you want answered, or as loose as a theme you want to explore together.

The most difficult mentoring meetings I’ve had have been ones where the mentee has failed to prepare anything. They’ve shown up expecting me to just give them advice, when I don’t know what they’re doing, what they’re struggling with, or what their goals are.

If you can, send through a sentence or two about what you want to cover to your mentor before you catch up so they can have a think and prepare anything that you might find useful.

✅ What should you even ask a mentor?

Here are some examples of topics you might want to cover with a mentor:

• Career journey and how their role has changed as they got more senior

• Industry knowledge and perspective on how its changing

• Résumé, cover letter, and portfolio reviews

• Interview practice and advice on the hiring process

• Guidance on career planning

• Conflict management, project planning, and other daily work challenges

💬 Summarise and follow up

The one thing that makes you stand out as an awesome mentee is making it clear what value you’re getting out of the mentorship. In my experience, these two behaviours are really rare, but they always impress me!

💡 Summarise what you got out of the session.

At the end of a mentoring catchup, you can summarise the key takeaways you got out of it. What really resonated with you, sparked an idea, or made you question yourself? These are all great to share with your mentor so that they see that they’ve made real impact with you – and as a bonus, summarising it on the fly is a good way to make sure you remember what you talked about!

📧 Follow back up with them.

If you’re not planning a next session with the mentor, it’s really rewarding to follow up with them about the actions you’ve taken since your session. Just a quick note with a couple of sentences is sufficient here.

If you are meeting with them again, you can touch on what actions you’ve taken since your last meeting at the start.

That’s it for this week! If you want to try out some of these tips, you can book a free mentoring call with me any time, or you can reply to this email with any questions or ideas for future posts.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.