When you’re mentoring someone, what do you call the person to whom you’re imparting all your wisdom? Mentee seems the easy, opposite of mentor, but I don’t like the term. Putting an “ee” on something makes it sound like something you’re “doing to” someone else.
Key Takeaways:
- Mentorship is a Gift: It’s about giving and offering wisdom to stimulate growth, with both mentor and mentee experiencing personal development.
- Mentoring Requires Effort: The mentee plays a pivotal role in the relationship, doing the bulk of the work by implementing advice, reflecting on outcomes, and sharing insights with the mentor.
- Sponsors vs. Mentors: Sponsors provide opportunities, while mentors offer guidance and support. Understanding the distinction is crucial for career advancement.
- Introduction of Protégé: The term “protégé” implies a deeper, more personal investment in the mentee’s success, fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between mentor and mentee.
- Building Meaningful Relationships: Effective mentorship involves getting to know one another, overcoming biases, and creating inclusive environments conducive to growth and learning.
Mentorship is a Gift
If mentorship is about anything, it’s about what you’re “giving to” or “offering to” the person you’re trying to help. Mentoring is about creating a relationship to stimulate your “mentee” to develop and grow. And make no mistake, it’s the “mentee” that’s doing the growing and development for themselves.
When a mentor does their job well, they also grow, but each partner in the relationship is doing their own growing. No one’s doing anything “to” the other.
Want to be a better mentor or mentee to women on the leadership track? Get these tips!
Being a Mentee is Work
When you have a mentor, regardless of how formal or informal the relationship is, you need to understand that you —the mentee—are doing most of the work in the relationship. Part of this is practical. Most likely you have more time and energy than your mentor to give the relationship. You’re also more likely to get the biggest benefit. More importantly, by doing the work to build the relationship and demonstrate growth to your mentor because of it, you are much more likely to achieve your goals.
What does it mean to “demonstrate your growth” to your mentor? Basically it means that you should:
- Even if some of their advice feels a bit off to you, assume they’ve give you some pearls of wisdom worth your time to explore
- Parse through their advice and choose the bits you want to try out
- Try them out
- Reflect on the results
- Share your reflections with your mentor and ask for more advice/insight
- Keep the cycle going
Sometimes people get to trying out some advice, but don’t finish the cycle by reflecting and sharing the results with their mentor. This can be from simple distraction or embarrassment when things didn’t go amazingly well. This is a real lost opportunity, for both parties. Actually it’s in the reflection and discussion—finishing the cycle even if it wasn’t “successful”—that the greatest learning and growth occur. Why show your growth to your mentor? Why finish the cycle regardless of the outcome? So many reasons!
- It makes your mentor feel respected, appreciated and motivated to keep helping you
- It helps them see where you still need their support
- It helps them understand how to help you grow into the next step of your journey
- Most importantly, it helps them get a feel for your potential and be more inclined to help sponsor you
No mentor can give you what you want, they can only give you resources, insights, advice and introductions to help you get it. They can also give you support to understand your experiences and help you learn from them. This last bit is invaluable.
Photo by krakenimages
Sponsors vs. Mentors: You need both
Sponsors help create opportunities for you. You mean all mentors aren’t sponsors? Nope! When you get a mentor you can hope they become a sponsor, but you’ll have to earn their additional support and this won’t always happen, especially if you don’[t take their advice and share the results with them.
Mentors provide information, support and encouragement. They help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes where the hidden dynamics of your business or industry operate. They help you understand what kind of opportunities may be out there for you and things you can do to access them. But their contribution to you is private and 1-1. Mentorship does not imply that they act or advocate on your behalf to anyone else.
Of course, sometimes they do! They cross the threshold from mentor to sponsor when they champion you for jobs, encourage others to give you a chance or in other ways put their own reputation on the line for your benefit. As you move along in your career, and the positions you want become more competitive, and this is why sponsors become at least as important as your own achievements for helping you realize your goals.
Getting the attention of either a mentor or a sponsor requires different strategies from the mentee’s point of view as well. You can actually ask a mentor for advice. Most actually appreciate your directness. But mentors are only giving their time, not their reputation. Mentors don’t see the decision to help you as making their own reputation at least partially dependent on your ability to succeed.
Sponsors, on the other hand, are attaching some of their personal and professional capital to your results. This is a bigger decision and one that’s very personal to them. If you happen to be close to a potential sponsor—either because of a long-standing mentor relationship, personal ties or work history—it might, sometimes, be appropriate to ask for their help championing you for a specific role or opportunity. But generally I don’t recommend it. In most cases you want your results and presence to speak for you in front of potential sponsors. Let them choose to support you because you’re just that good.
Want insights into how to get the attention of Executive Sponsors? Learn more.
Let’s Introduce the Idea of Protégé
All that said, mentors can do a lot to help a mentee succeed, even if they don’t go to the extent of sponsoring them in a public way. But to do so a mentor needs to feel personally invested in their partner’s success. As I said above the word “mentee” is rather neutral and doesn’t connote the kind of true support a mentor should be giving their partner in a deep and meaningful mentoring relationship. In my experience the best mentors feel from the outset that they have a personal stake in their partner’s success, even if not a reputational on, and are more motivated to help them as a result.
(That said, I don’t believe every mentor should have the obligation to become that person’s champion or sponsor. Their partner must earn this opportunity, independent of their mentor’s direct support.)
But I believe every mentor should go into their mentoring relationship with the hope that they will want to become their sponsor and champion their mentee to third parties. The best mentors should try to guide them in ways that make this possible. I like the idea of the mentor feeling they have a personal stake in the other’s success and this is why I like the word “protégé better than mentee. It implies more respect and possibility for mutual benefit.
It can be challenging for a mentor to feel so deeply connected to a proteegé, especially if that person is assigned to them. When mentors are assigned, both parties have an extra burden to get to know each other and find reasons they want to work together. The best mentorship programs support this and provide opportunities up front, and even mentor partnership coaching, to learn each other’s career experience, goals and points of interconnection.
For mentors and mentee-protégés alike, this is the work of mentorship. To get to know your partner, even if they are unlike you due to age, background and culture. This is often a learning opportunity for the mentor as well, to move beyond their own biases (and we all have them) and to learn to be a more inclusive leader who can work well with people across age, gender, racial and other divides. It’s important for mentors to go beyond the tropes of leadership; to be a little vulnerable in sharing the ups and downs of their journey; to be open to learning from the experience of your partner, regardless of their relative inexperience.
So whether you’re called a mentor, a mentee or a protégé, ask yourself how invested you are in the other’s success. Create the kind of relationship that makes it more likely you can do more and go deeper to help the other.
