GUEST MENTOR Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction: Having a mentor that guides you throughout the various stages of your career is a necessity for all of us, regardless of industry, experience, age or gender. Mentorship, like any business relationship, comes with expectations, challenges and plenty of considerations, too. Any time you consciously decide to identify a trusted business relationship based on professional needs and personal vulnerability, there’s a lot to consider.
Finding a mentor, for example, includes an entire cycle of activities; but understanding what the role of a mentor is and knowing what specific qualities to look for in a mentor are challenges in and of themselves. I’ve had lots of experience as both a mentor and mentee. The insights I’ve gained into what it means to be a good mentor, how to find the right mentor and what qualities mentees should be looking for — depending on the type of mentor they need — are important to share.
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There are two types of mentors: Those who serve as a coach, and those who serve as a counselor. It’s important to first figure out which type of mentor is right for you. The role of the coach is to offer more balanced and objective feedback based on specific growth milestones, as well as share knowledge and domain expertise through their own relevant expertise and years on the job. The coach is essentially there to provide operational guidance and feedback, or what you can think of as feedback on your growth “playbook.”
The role of the counselor is to provide more emotional and psychological support. They can help you untangle facts from feelings, people from the process, product from the market and the individual issues from the organization’s structural issues. They are empathic listeners, helping you unclutter your emotional pathways so operational feedback can actually sink in and be applied to the situation.
Both the coach and the counselor serve important roles, and if you need help or advice in both of these areas, it’s a good idea to find two different mentors who can support you as a coach and as a counselor, as it’s rare to find both of these skills in one mentor. I personally have had both types of mentors throughout my career, and still do.
When I took on the role of CEO to grow Get Satisfaction, I needed more expertise and perspective on the workings of a freemium business model. It was a Rubik’s Cube of decisions around product flows, the billing challenges, the packaging and pricing options and even the conversion standards. To get help, I sought out operational mentorship from colleagues that had similar business models — including Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, Ryan McDonough, former CFO of Ning, and Chris Yeh, VP of Marketing at PBworks. Each of them mentored me on the pros, cons and practices of freemium.
But I’ve also really benefitted from having mentors that have served as counselors. Growing a business is an emotional roller coaster and a lonesome spot to be in sometimes. During the last four years at Get Satisfaction, I’ve depended on two people who have helped to balance out the emotional knots — especially when I was raising capital. Because of her own experiences as a CEO and her several decades of experience working as a VC, Heidi Roizen has been a great mentor to me. Bob Pasker, serial entrepreneur and founder of WebLogic, has also been a helpful sounding board mentor in the product and engineering area of our growth. His honesty and tough love have always helped me make difficult yet important hiring decisions.
It’s essential to note that mentors aren’t there to give you all of the answers. Mentors are there to assist you in untangling whatever it is that you are grappling with — again, this can be either operationally or emotionally. Mentors essentially serve as a set of objective eyes and ears. In the end, it’s completely up to the mentee to take the knowledge that mentors pass on and apply it.
Good mentors are neutral about how much — if any — of their perspective gets applied short term, long term, in part or in whole. Their main role is to serve you as the mentee, not their own careers. These days, it’s not as hard to find a great mentor as it was back when I was starting out my career. I’ve noticed a real inclination among my peers to want to give back to others, and it’s likely because we’ve all been there before and remember the role our mentors played in lifting us up both operationally and emotionally at a critical time in our growth path.
When looking for a mentor, it’s important to be clear about what you need. Are you looking for a coach or a counselor? It’s a good idea to create a spec sheet — similar to what you do when you’re looking for a board member — in which you list a set of specific attributes that you’re looking for in a mentor. Once you know exactly what you want, you’ll be more effective (and efficient) in your search.
Mentorship has taken on a high profile these days, so it’s not hard to create a pipeline of prospective mentors. Talk to people you respect, go on LinkedIn, check with your personal network and go to events where people who have the expertise you’re interested in would likely attend. But remember, just because someone is an expert in an area you want help in doesn’t mean that they’re the right mentor for you. That expertise has to be toned, packaged and exchanged in a particular way. You have to be able to have good chemistry, the right conversational rhythm, and feel safe and insanely curious to access the jewels of wisdom from their perspective.
Good mentors must be compassionate, rather than just empathic. I’ve come to realize there’s a real difference between empathy and compassion, and some mentors fall prey to the heart tugs of empathy. What I mean by this is that some mentors want to walk in the shoes of their mentee too much and when you do that you lose perspective and objectivity. The reality is that as the mentor, there’s no way to have experienced what the mentee is going through, because you’re not in their heads, hearts or daily routine.
What I find helpful is to be completely compassionate—meaning open but detached—about the scenario my mentees are describing and what they need help with. That way, I can really hear the problems of my mentees and not lose myself trying to be them. This allows me to help them help themselves be creative in discovering a solution, rather than being overly attached and prescriptive based on a surface level understanding of the situation and too much alignment with the mentee’s description of the situation.
Before taking the plunge, make sure you are really ready to be mentored. It’s important to realize that one of the requirements of being a good mentee is the ability to be vulnerable. This means being able to admit, “I don’t know this,” or “I need help, council or advice.” This isn’t simple to do; it’s just not part of our human nature. It is, however, important, to be open to a level of vulnerability with a mentor.
Having a good mentor is essentially like having access to “help on demand”—and the help depends on the type of mentor you have. But simply having a mentor isn’t going to change anything unless you actively process, experiment and apply the information and knowledge you’re getting. Just having the conversation doesn’t solve anything, unfortunately—you still have to go out and actually act on the advice
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