Chapter 6

Finding the Right Mentors

by Diane Coutu

If you’re waiting for a wise, dedicated mentor to recognize your potential and lead you down the yellow brick road to happiness and fortune, you’ll be waiting a long time—and even then you’re likely to be disappointed. To exploit your opportunities to grow and move ahead in your work and your life, your best bet will always be to take matters into your own hands and seek out the people who can help you.

Before you decide which ones to turn to, though, you’ll have to figure out what kinds of mentors will best meet your needs. In my own long experience on both sides of the mentoring relationship, I’ve come across three distinct types:

The co-mentor: This can be anyone—a peer, a colleague, a friend—who needs you as much as you need him

A relationship between equals, co-mentoring is rooted in the desire for skill or knowledge exchange. For that reason, it’s often more short-lived than a top-down mentoring relationship. It dissolves when both parties have achieved their goals. When people co-mentor each other, they typically want to learn something very specific: They may want to become proficient in a software program, for example, or better at speaking a foreign language.

My colleague David and I co-mentored each other years ago as senior editors at Harvard Business Review. We had a number of things in common: He was European; I had lived in Europe for 20 years. We had both studied at Oxford University and had lived in Germany. But it was what we didn’t share that brought us into our co-mentoring relationship. He had an MBA and was a banker; I had studied literature, philosophy, and psychology and was a journalist. He understood business strategy and finance and could write case studies; I understood leadership and organizational development, and I knew how to report on those topics. We both came to our senior editor positions at HBR with significant strengths—but we also had deep holes in our knowledge and capabilities.

Together, though, we were a cohesive whole. We moved into the same office and worked at the same computer, sometimes with four hands on one keyboard, teaching each other how to develop HBR articles. We became increasingly productive as we learned more about editing and more about each other’s skills. Our co-mentoring relationship lasted about a year and a half, and during that time we learned how to succeed on our own as generalists. Although we remained good friends and continued to offer advice on each other’s articles, we’d become self-sufficient. The co-mentoring had served its purpose—ending it was the right thing to do.

Though chances are good you can’t move into the same office as your co-mentor, you can set the stage for your own meaningful give-and-take in other ways. Try meeting regularly for a working breakfast or lunch, for example, or scheduling video chats on Skype—a medium that’s conducive to hands-on teaching and learning because your computer and files are right there while you’re using it.

The remote mentor: This is someone outside your organization who can offer a fresh perspective and objective advice

Though mentors from your company can be invaluable, given their familiarity with the culture and the key players, certain needs are best served by outside, or “remote,” mentors. Suppose your unit needs to downsize, and you have to decide which people to keep on staff when there isn’t any dead weight to shed. If the senior managers you work with are short on creative ideas for solving the problem because it’s the first time they’ve faced it, you may want to consult with someone who has orchestrated a successful reorg at another company altogether. Or say you’re being groomed to lead your department or unit, and everybody knows it. You’ve got a lot of important learning to do, but people may not be open with their feedback, even when you ask for it directly. Sometimes they bite their tongues or, worse, stroke your ego, afraid that anything they say now might count against them when you take the reins. Look for one or more mentors on the outside to get you up to speed on setting agendas, building teams, delegating, and other senior management skills.

Remote mentors can be family members, friends, old college professors—anyone in another company or another industry. They can even be strangers.

That was the case with a mentor I’ll call Jon. When I was 35, on leave from the Wall Street Journal Europe, I decided to work on a short memoir about being a pioneering woman in the 1970s. I had never taken a creative writing course, had never published anything besides journalistic articles, and had nothing but hope—and stories—to fuel my efforts. Though I had the discipline to write every day, I knew I needed instruction in the craft of creative nonfiction: How do you tell a compelling personal story that will resonate for others? How much detail is too much? How do you avoid the narcissistic traps that so many memoir writers fall into?

Living in Brussels at a time before there was much remote learning going on in universities, I didn’t have ready access to the relevant courses in English. I had also exhausted the other mentoring resources around me. So I sought out writers who shared my interest in psychology, writers whose creative work I admired. I read biographies and narrowed my search to authors whose backgrounds and sensibilities intersected with mine. After poring over their letters, essays, fiction, and whatever else they had produced, I sat down and sent out 15 customized letters asking for help. Because my search was so targeted, it was very successful—every writer responded. Two offered to work with me through correspondence. I chose Jon for his sense of humor, and so our remote mentoring relationship began.

We never met; we never spoke on the phone. But we exchanged letters almost every week. I sent him pages of prose, which he marked up in red, teaching me about voice and pacing and segues from scene to scene. Even after I finally had a decent manuscript, Jon and I continued our correspondence until he died a few years later. The relationship was remote in the truest sense: He wrote to me only after I wrote to him. The advice was never unsolicited or paternalistic, and it was always in direct response to a question I had asked. In return, he asked me to critique his published works. I offered as much constructive criticism to him as he had to me—and in doing so, I honed a skill that was essential to my work as an editor both at McKinsey & Company and Harvard Business Review: giving honest, sometimes tough, feedback to authors.

The invisible mentor: This is someone you learn from with little or no direct interaction

Choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp knew that George Balanchine, the larger-than-life artistic director of the New York City Ballet, was the person she would learn from the most, structurally and musically. They met only three times—he didn’t teach open classes, so she couldn’t simply sign up for one—yet he served as her invisible mentor for 20 years. As Tharp explained when I interviewed her for an HBR article: “I mentally parked him in the corner of my studio, and the insistence on thoroughness that I saw in him became my standard.”

A mentor like that doesn’t have a personal relationship with you but can be crucial to your development. Invisible mentors may be unresponsive or deceased, or even authors of books that speak to you. “When someone asks me how to find a mentor,” Tharp told me, “I tell them, ‘Just go to Barnes & Noble and pull down a book from a shelf—pick out a writer, pick out a thinker. Pick out somebody who can teach you something.’” History is filled with people who turned to books for their mentoring. John F. Kennedy read Winston Churchill; Bill Clinton read Kennedy.

My literary mentor is Emily Dickinson. At every stage of my life, she’s had something to offer—whether I was studying the Holy Ghost in the fourth grade or struggling to understand human psychology when I was 30. I identified with Dickinson because she was an utterly free thinker. Her belief about the role of women in society was as complex and unconventional as she was. But above all she was a brilliant writer—someone who kept reaching out for mentors, and who kept writing to them, even though they didn’t help her find success (in the traditional sense) during her lifetime. When I tried my own hand at writing, she provided inspiration, wisdom, solace, and companionship.

So how can you choose your own invisible mentors? Think about the leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, athletes, and others at the top of their game who move you. Why do they move you? Is it because of their craftsmanship? Their drive to excel? Their creativity? Their integrity? That “why” will shine a light on values and talents they can, by example, help you cultivate.

No matter what type of mentoring relationship you’re in, it must have clear boundaries. You can deliberately draw and observe them, or the situation (a firm deadline, for instance) may force them. Either way, you need sharp lines to keep you out of murky personal territory: If you start expecting intimacy from your mentor, for example, or looking at him as the father you never had, you’re headed for trouble and disappointment.

That said, feeling connected is key—whether it’s with a co-mentor, who benefits from the relationship as much as you do; a remote mentor, who interacts with you thoughtfully but from a distance; or an invisible mentor, who has no idea you exist but calls out to you all the same. “Clicking” with someone you look up to empowers and motivates you to do your best work. Sometimes that matters even more than expertise.

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Diane Coutu is the director of client communications at Banyan Family Business Advisors. She also mentors high school students through the college application process.