This past weekend I was invited to spend an hour talking about Silicon Valley business with a group of MBA students from Russia. They were on a junket to Palo Alto from the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo. I did my thing, insulting as many people and companies as possible, the students listened politely, and at the end there were a few questions, though not nearly as many as I had hoped for. If you’ve ever heard one of my presentations the most fun tends to take place during the Q&A. That’s because I can’t know in advance what a group really cares about but in the Q&A they can tell me and sometimes we learn a thing or two. One question really surprised me and inspired this column: “In Silicon Valley,” the MBA student asked, “it seems that mentoring is an important part of learning business and getting ahead, yet mentoring is unknown in Russia. How does it work when there is no obvious reward for the mentor? Why do people do it?”
I suspect that this question says far more about Russian business culture than it says about the U.S., because mentoring is alive and well in places like China and Japan. A lack of mentoring, if true, probably puts Russia at a disadvantage. Disadvantaged and, frankly, clueless.
I have had mentors and I have been a mentor in turn and however squishy there usually is a quid pro quo for the mentor. Maybe he or she is flattered by the attention. Maybe they are just paying it forward. But I’m pretty sure the Russian MBA student was wrong and this mentoring business has a reward structure, just not a standardized or very rich one.
I asked a couple friends about their mentoring experiences. Avram Miller, who co-founded Intel Capital and is arguably the father of home broadband had this to say:
“I would not have been successful in my career had not a number of people (they were all men) helped me develop my skills and opened doors for me. They were all older than I was. Maybe it was some extension of parenting for them. I in return have done the same for many younger people. I also try to help my friends but in that case, we call it friendship. The most important thing about being a mentor is the sense of impact and accomplishment. I have and do mentor women as well. I don’t think there is anything special about high tech and mentoring. Also some great managers were not great mentors.”
Read Avram’s excellent blog at www.twothirdsdone.com.
Richard Miller (no relation to Avram) took a different view. Richard is English and came to the USA as VP of R&D at Atari, reporting to Jack Tramiel, whom I have a hard time thinking of as a mentor, but what do I know? Richard designed the Atari Jaguar game console and many other systems since including leading the team at PortalPlayer (now nVIDIA) that designed the Tegra mobile processors:
“I doubt many business professionals think of themselves as mentors except in some kind of ego-bloated hindsight way,” said Richard, I guess handling that inevitable Jack Tramiel question. “They may be good mentors since the methods of mentoring are effective in achieving their goals, but it is rare for a business leader to devote any thought or time on the subject in my experience. In the business space, the act of mentoring is in reality something that the mentee (is that a word?) creates through his or her own study. The most effective learning tool in that environment is access. In the technical fields mentoring is very important and in good companies it is structured, in more of a professor-postgrad kind of setup. I’m sure you’ll find this happening at Intel, Google etc. I see it a lot both here and in Asia (China, Japan, India).”
Though I hadn’t thought of this before, Richard is probably correct that the effects of mentoring are largely guided by the questions of the student and that person’s willingness to learn from the answers. And, thinking further, I can see that in my own career where there are people with whom I’ve spent only a few hours that have, through their insights, changed my life. Or maybe, in Richard’s view, it was through my willingness to ask the right questions and absorb the insights that this happened.
What do you think? Has mentoring had a positive role in your life and career?
The most interesting and useful things I have learned and gained, came from people who did it for free, shared their experience, and asked the right questions, so by this definition they were probably mentors, not knowing so. I think that you are right about the questions – in this relationship, the mentor asks the right questions for the mentee to ponder on but it is equally important for the mentee to ask the questions and be willing to absorb and relate the answers. IMHO, good mentors are the ones that are learning from their mentees and getting new perspectives. by this standard your writing is mentoring as it gets. in a sense, each post of yours has some kind of question mark at its end, which in turn provokes thinking.
that’s good stuff.
Mentoring certainly doesn’t begin and end in the tech industry. My wife is a barrister and so was my mother (she qualified back in the early 50’s). Each of them in their day, having fully qualified, and secured acceptance into “Chambers”, became “pupils” and were allocated a “pupil master”. The practice continues to this day. The pupil will shadow a more senior member of chambers around the courts, helping out, doing research, and watching advocacy in action. Learning on the job. Both being a pupil and a pupil master is a rite of passage in any barristerial career. My mother went on to be only the third woman in Britain to be appointed a judge.
I actually understood some of your terminology since PBS recently started broadcasting “Silk” episodes here in the US.
Interesting. My wife and I watched “Silk”. Much of the “feel” of the action is fairly true to life, especially since a lot of it is shot on location in the Dickensian precincts of The Temple, where my wife has her chambers (and my mother back in the day). The storylines are borderline implausible of course, and the barristers’ Machiavellian clerk makes a great character but is a crazily exaggerated version of reality. It is also extremely unlikely that the same colleagues would constantly be meeting one another in court.
Mentoring has been tremendously important in my career.
My first mentor, and probably the only one who thought of himself that way, allowed me to experiment freely with his personal computer, breaking it rather thoroughly in the process — “What does this ‘fdisk’ command do?” “Try it, and then you tell me.” “Uhohhh…” — and then proceeded to patiently teach me over many days how to reinstall an configure an operating system and follow on applications from the ground up. He didn’t reveal much at once, preferring to let me fumble and make (yet more) mistakes, giving timely advice when I most needed a boost or was about to give up. The most important thing I learned in this period was not technical skills, although I’ve used those things way too many times to count, but learning how to learn, how to teach and lead my self into things I do not know.
Since then I’ve had two other mentors, each of which made substantial and ongoing contributions to my workplace expertise. Both would likely be mildly surprised to find the mentor label applied to them. Like the first, the deepest contributions they’ve made to me have not been specific techniques, though those are certainly there, but rather general approaches to solving problems, an open attitude to challenges, and a drive to perfect solutions.
Richard Miller’s view resonates strongly. It was my questing nature and openness to being taught that pushed the mentoring forward, but if the mentors had not been there to fertilize and catalyze at the right points, the growth would have been limited, much smaller in scope.
Your Russian visitors may be right about mentoring being common in SV, but we certainly didn’t invent it or even first promote it. In the Pirkei Avot, a portion of the Talmud (translated roughly as “The Ethics of Our Fathers”), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perachia advised 1900 years ago:
“Choose yourself a mentor. Acquire for yourself a friend.”
In my experience, the Rabbi got it just right: a mentor is inevitably selected by the mentee, invariably because the mentee is open and willing to be trained and counseled. Maybe that’s why mentoring is popular in the SV: people here are receptive to the idea of learning from those with greater life and professional experience.
I looked for mentors over the years and pretty much got screwed over by managers who noticed this in me and pretty much took advantage of my strong technical skills. When I needed advice, assistance or support none was forth coming. Lesson learnt.
As an older person I mentor others, sharing my advice and technical skills without expecting anything in return. However, I do tend to think as I talk and use my mentees as a sounding board for ideas, and they are generally pretty good listeners.
How did you answer their question, Bob? Or is that for a future column?
In Scotland we have “Enterprise” companies set up by the government who are supposed to provide business mentors for start ups as one of many different things they are supposed to do.
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I got one standing on my coat tails when I started up in business. I played the game with him to see what else they could offer and it was frankly a waste of my time.
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Then, at an innovation award ceremony where I was being presented with a minor award I overheard him telling others how I was one of his protégés. To me that was rather sickening as it was my own determinations and hard work, plus what I’d learned through my years at college and university plus my parent’s input, who were successful business people themselves, that had got me to that point; he had contributed nothing but was on my coat tails taking credit for my hard work.
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I have, however, asked other people in business what they’d do in certain situations that I’ve found myself in. Their advice is priceless. If in the USA mentoring is where highly successful people pass on their advice then those receiving are in a privileged position. However, it’s only their own brilliance and determination which will make any business happen and be successful.
Bob,
Excellent article.
Mentoring has been key in my life. I once had just a one hour lunch with a top executive in my field and it changed my perspective on life. We connected over tuna fish sandwiches. Having his name as a valid reference was very helpful in my career.
I try to pay it forward as a mentor but find it takes a certain type of person to be a ‘mentee’. They must recognize the value and opportunity being given. It’s difficult to find these types of people but rewarding when the connection is made.
(used “***” in place of lines between paragraphs as for some reason line returns aren’t showing)
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Mentoring was critical to my development in IT, from the first years through to working in management. And I have enjoyed mentoring as well though my current situation precludes as much of it as I’d like.
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To me, the particular value of mentoring was avoiding learning some lessons the hard way, by listening to those who had. It also allowed me to bridge a gap in formal IT training. It especially prepared me for corporate America, as the less formal and technical aspects focused on dealing with office politics, “CYA” (in a good way, meaning being proactive and proper about record-keeping, communication, and trouble-shooting, etc.), and other important non-technical aspects of a corporate career.
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The best mentors and mentoring, in my experience, always occurred informally and organically, out of mutual need (most often a shared project/initiative, sometimes ongoing organizational/process interaction) and respect. Frankly, I see formal mentoring structures as rarely working well; I think this is generally because they are contrived circumstances and participants realize that, and thus do not put such serious attention and focus into it. Also, again just in my experience, there’s an aspect, typically and in the best mentoring situations, where the participants simply like each other as people and/or colleagues and are reacting out of mere social bonding.
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I really don’t know Russian culture that well, but have interacted professionally with some number of Russians over the year; I’m going to venture an educated guess based on things they’ve told me and experiences I’ve had that to the degree the culture does not foster mentoring it may be a reflection of a fear of giving information due to a “dog eat dog” environment where the competition for resources and advancement is unusually fierce such that it’s a greater (perceived) incentive to use the information from someone to get ahead of them rather than “pay back” and respect such mentoring. From a few people from Russia, I’ve heard that’s a holdover of the Soviet state and the combination of the lack of avenues to get ahead coupled with an extremely bureaucratic and Byzantine sociocultural structure for getting things done. Atop that, and it’s simply sensible in such an environment and as we seem to see in a history as focused on triumph and tragedy as Russia’s, there’s a special cultural respect for those who “bulldoze” their way through obstacles (a cultural value Russians and Americans share, as expressed in the American folklore of the “self-made man;” it seems to me, though American culture is tempered by a history of abundance even while possessing an extremely competitive business climate at times, clearly). That said, I’m only reacting to the blog’s statement; while Russian colleagues and I have discussed the challenges of navigating Russian bureaucracy in daily life and the impacts on corporate and interpersonal culture, I have never heard this comment regarding mentoring.
When I got my engineering degree I went to work in a large company with over 1000 engineers. Several of them immediately took me under their wing and helped me in my work and my career. In later years I learned many of them were WW2 veterans. I began to realize there is a culture among veterans to help each other. It is something they had to do to survive the war and they brought that culture into the workplace. Having many of them as mentors was a blessing.
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There were many others who helped me who never served in the military. They enjoyed working with young people. If you spend any time with college professors you will discover one of the perks of their jobs is in working with young people. Some of my mentors enjoyed working with younger people and they were a blessing to my career too.
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I can tell you from first hand experience both as a mentor and as a mentee, your college education is usually not enough to be successful. A good mentor can teach you far more than you could ever imagine. Passing down that knowledge and experience from generation to generation is important. About 25-30 years ago corporations began laying off their older workers and their older engineers in very large numbers. In doing this they broke the process of passing information to the younger generation. Today I see an increasing number of commercial and industrial mistakes and accidents. There are reasons things are done that you will never find in a text book or a class.
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Take a close look at the two shuttle accidents, the terrible refinery accidents of recent years, and yes, even the BP Gulf spill — in each of them you will find inexperienced people making decisions based on tools and techniques they did not fully understand. You will find managers forcing decisions and there were no “seasoned” experts who had the clout to stand up to them. Knowing when to speak out and how to speak out, and having a support network of mentors has prevented countless accidents.
Yes, vets being great mentors. That was my experience too. It’s not at all a question of having someone sitting in the corner watching and dropping words of wisdom. My first mentor’s first advice was to go outside and walk around the building at least once. (Big building at the side of the river in Portland.) I was rational after my trip and still regularly walk around buildings. Don never told me what I was doing or why, but I subsequently noticed him vanishing (no fuss) for 15-30 minutes as the stress meter was climbing.
Dan
Several books I’ve read on entrepreneurship have stressed that people WANT to help. Men in particular like to impart knowledge (that’s not a slam on women; the “How does that make you feel” style of mentoring is also useful (getting in deeper…)).
I have a feeling that in Russia, it’s not just business culture, but a long history of a culture of hiding out from oppression, from the Czars through Putin.
I feel sorry for Russia. Disadvantaged indeed.
In academia (at least in the sciences, in research-focused institutions), mentoring is highly valued and is generally considered part of the job: students work in a professor’s lab, and it is expected that the professor will not only fund the student and help teach them research skills but also help guide them into the next phase of their career (usually a postdoctoral fellowship). Postdocs generally receive less formal mentoring, depending on their personality and that of their faculty advisor, but even then career guidance is the norm. Even at the faculty level, mentoring still occurs, although you have to seek it out more: since I became a professor, there are several people who I regularly turn to for advice (some at my institution, others I’ve known from earlier parts of my career). I would argue that the value placed on mentoring is one of the things that makes an academic environment enjoyable to work in.
As a retired Engineering Professor, Department Head, Dean of Engineering and Principal of a College I think that much of engineering undergraduate, graduate and post-doc study is actively mentored. Engineering courses almost always involve problem-solving sessions and labs during both of which there is a lot of one-on-one discussion and guidance. Heads mentor new faculty to get them started on the right foot. Deans help new Heads and lab directors get rolling. College principals help all the other administrators keep their budgets straight and to get their projects rolling. Professing, if I can use that term, is much, much more that standing in front of a class for a few hours a week.
Coincidentally got this today about mentoring:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/08/constructing_your_career_castl.html
Mentors look for curious, teachable folks. I look for those that have the determination to dig their own gold, but need help finding a shovel. They want to learn and are ready for an opportunity. I’ve been fortunate to have been mentored by my boss and his co-workers (and not in a subordinate type way. I asked the questions and they pointed me in the right direction). While they didn’t actively seek me out ( I was the one doing the hunting), I have two folks in the company that I have pulled and pointed to get them farther than they may have otherwise in the same time frame. I cannot take credit for their curiosity or smarts of course. Both are two -year degree technicians that have the capacity to go well beyond. Now one is doing and has the title (and being paid) to the same work as a normal Electrical Engineer with same years of experience. The other individual will be. His current boss is holding him back. And yes. I get payback from both in a couple different ways. I use them both to look over and test out the stuff I do to find issues I didn’t think of or missed. And I have a couple of life long friends.
Bob, I would include in the mentoring category columns such as yours, as pointed out by Alex, and various types of how-to and empowering publications. All of these sources of insights and new information help to expand a person’s world view.
I recall reading a financial adviser’s opinion years ago that China was an upcoming nation. At the time, that seemed to be such nonsense to me. However, my limited world view was exposed as China became a manufacturing power. Now I try to be more open to new viewpoints. (But it is difficult for me to break the habit of using beliefs rather than reality to determine my actions.)
“The person in receipt of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female), an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentorship
Traditionalists will frown on “mentee,” but it’s gender-neutral and doesn’t have all the accent marks.
I work for a large city government in the US. Here, Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines say that all supervisors are supposed to help their supervisees to promote. They’re not supposed to show favoritism.
Darn it, I wanted to be the first to state that a mentee is a protoge. But then I wouldn’t have been able to speak to the female version or the newer term now actually being mentee. No doubt etymologists will reference this blog in the future.
I commented this in your Jobs Movie review; I think Jobs was mentored, either formally or not, by his time on the Disney Board.
I spent a year working in Russia for an IT company and I’m not sure where they got the idea that mentoring doesn’t exist in Russia. It certainly does, at all levels of the company. Of course this depends on the company and its corporate culture (perhaps I simply lucked out and happened to land a stint with a company that was the exception), but this is true anywhere: Corporate culture depends on the company, not the country. I get the feeling that Russians just hate their country and want to seize on any excuse they can find to denigrate it.
I find some of these comments hard to believe. It’s a common complaint for guys in my generation that the baby boomers did nothing for us. I suppose at a school like Stanford you would have mentors but at a state college it doesn’t happen. I like reading Cringely because he’s a bit of a mentor, but it’s a rare thing. They do give the girls more attention and sometimes minorities, even foreign people. They seem reluctant to do anything for a white guy.
Thinking about this a bit more probably I did have mentors. The problem is if the job didn’t work out or the career didn’t last then you forget who helped you. This is related to the h1bs and all that. It destroys those relationships. The damage is exponential. Actually, I had a few foreign people help me. It gives you an idea how important success is. You remember everything related to it.
“When the student is ready, the teacher appears”
I have been mentored in several careers… journalism, programming/systems manglement, and now in broadband.
there is a protection given, and intelligence relayed. the payment appears to be the satisfaction of generating people who are smarter and more eager than the mentor is.
I find people who have been guided into discovery are much more generous and happier than those who drift in “knowing all the answers” and being disillusioned by the process, bureaucracy, and dimwittedness of Systems and Corporations. doesn’t change the Systems and Corporations, any time anything gets too big and satisfied, the path to stagnation and dissolution has been paved and signed. but getting around the roadblocks has its satisfaction, while the “experts” who came in to shake things up just bang their heads against the wall.
Pratim expresses it succinctly.
No one wants to force someone to learn, but we will often bend over backwards to help those who truly want to.
I had several mentors over the years who were very influential and helped me make jumps in the learning curve at the time. It’s only in retrospect that I recognized these jumps and felt the satisfaction of having made them. After a bit of experience, I believe, any decent member of society will feel lucky to have had those experiences and want to help create the same for others. That’s why I seek out opportunities to mentor. Success in mentoring offer their own satisfaction and payback. So overall, I’d credit early mentoring with generating the impetus and the process of mentoring itself as its own reward. In both cases, a completely positive experience on balance.
The idea of mentoring is one of the basis of the hackerspace movement which I embarssingly only discovered last year… This discovery and all that I learned as a result of hanging around in hackerspaces or on their forums and mailing lists has changed my life in many ways.
Prior to that, I had become interested in flying radio-controlled helicopters. There is absolutely no way of doing that without being mentored, or taught by professionals. Many great heli builders and pilots showed me things and taught me how to do it. In particular, the helifreak forum is a world of mentors, where no question is too dumb to be treated with respect and respectfully answered. Helifreaks is a model for what a fourm can and should be. I now help others, even though I know I will never even meet them.
Finally, having practiced martial arts, I can tell you that although the teacher is responsible for the class, the sentior students all mentor the junior ones, so that eveyrone can progress. It is a fundamental part of the practice of martial arts.
I think that the main reason that I help others is to feel like I am improving the world in which I live. So it is not altruistic. I always get a thrill when someone suddenly understands why he/she should do something as I have said, be it programming, adjusting helis, or just hanging out laundry. Every time someone does something better, the world is a better place for everyone. Participating in that improvement is fun and rewarding and only right since so many others have helped me and are still helping today!
Paul Hawken and/or Michael Philips and/or Salli Rasberry and/ or Claude Whytmyer coined the phrase and the notion – “Tradeskills” – meaning intuitive business skills. The notion says that one has to have “extensive “business experiences (family business or otherwise) by age 18 ; or one cannot successfully start and run a business. And getting an MBA will do nothing to overcome that lack of experience before age 18. However , the notion says that by interning with a highly successful business person for 7 years – one can absorb the needed skill sets! “Briar Patch” a non profit quasi mentoring organization was started by the later three (above) about 30 years ago. a few companies have a mentoring process as well. The French company Manutan makes new management people intern/ get mentored for 7 years before they can make a decision on their own! Goddard College has a 36 year old mentoring program which is unique. It’s run under it’s Masters Program. One picks a world authority/expert in the field of one’s interest. Get’s that expert to agree to mentor for 36 months. Then spends 36 months with the expert. Student defines what is going to be achieved – comes back to Goddard every 6 months and tells a panel (chosen by student) what’s been achieved. Panel evelauates if student is achieving desired outcomes.
In a word no. I am envious when I read stories where people got all kinds of mentoring and support from supervisors and others in the industry. In my second career in IT which now is over 25 years, I have been on my own. If I didn’t pick up a book or go to a seminar, or did a Webinar, I would still be sitting around wondering how to install a hard drive or write a line of code!
Mick – were you actively seeking mentoring support over those 25 years? I don’t think potential mentors go out thinking ‘I’m going to try and find a mentee today’ – in my opinion the onus is on the mentee to ask for help.
I’ve worked in IT for about 25 years. When I firsted started, the word “mentor” wasn’t even used. Fresh programmers were called trainees, and the “mentoring” just happened as it needed to.
These days, my company (and other businesses in Australia) usually only hires experienced people. Graduate intake is very low. When fresh graduates do join, they are paraded around the place, lauded on the intranet and in company emails, hobnob with the executives; in short, they are treated as precious little darlings because they are so rare and the company wants to make such a big deal about how it’s providing for the future blah blah (shudder).
The “mentoring” programme is very structured, however unlike Bob I think that ruins it. You have to apply to HR to be a mentor, you have to be a manager (even though it’s the older non-management employees who have the useful skills), and your attitude needs to be, how do I put it, correctly adjusted. There are a ton of forms to fill in (which makes it as useless as employee reviews), and the email that HR sends out stresses that the people that are chosen as mentors have to commit themselves and stick to the plan, which tells me that all the interviewing, form-filling, progress updates, and so on quickly just become a chore.
I am very angry at the corporate executives in this country who are destroying its IT industry. Besides the fake skills shortage and everything else, I genuinely feel they have robbed me of the opportunity to pass on my own skills and experience. That I feel this way about it should answer the question about “how does it work when there is no obvious reward for the mentor”.
I think that this mentor/mentee chain has been damaged somewhat.
When I graduated from science/engineering school last century (!), most of my fellow students landed jobs where it was expected that they would only be of real value to the company after a year or two of mentoring and learning what the job and industry was all about. Partial or full payment by the employer for part time graduate school was often offered as an incentive to stick with the company for a few years after this apprenticeship of sorts.
Now, companies are under tremendous pressure to meet quarterly investment market “expectations”. (Often, these are a bit like your kid’s “expectation” of getting a purple unicorn for their birthday…). So, a lot of companies don’t build the same mentoring process into the timeline. That might be short sighted, but that’s how it works. In addition, many companies seem to also demand graduate degrees as an entry level requirement. I presume that’s because of a belief that an MS is a direct replacement for “learning the ropes”.
Is it working?
I’m not sure about that, but I do know that I had a lot of folks help me along the way. My repayment to them, aside from offering thanks and doing my best while working for or with them, has been to help the next generation. Most companies I’ve worked at of late really didn’t appreciate me spending time doing that…
Mentors profit from having mentees by remaining current. A mentor is someone who is established and thus not as connected to newer ideas, technologies, innovations, and so on. A mentee brings new ideas and research into the picture, and thus forces a mentor to stay up to date.
This is why a teaching hospital is the best hospital to be in. You might think you wouldn’t want inexperienced doctors and residents working on you, but actually that environment means cutting edge medical care. Attending doctors must keep up with their residents, after all.
Hey Cringe, forgive me for going off topic, but your comment “If you’ve ever heard one of my presentations….” piqued my interest.
Do you have a list anywhere of your upcoming presentations? Do you even do presentations that are open to the general public? If so, would love to attend, especially if you ever make it down here to SoCal.
Any and all info appreciated, thanks.
Thanks for the post Bob, I’m a big fan of your blog.
As someone who runs operations for a large startup accelerator group, I’m in essence in the business of connecting startups with mentor’s (and investors, partners, etc). Here’s a few quick things that came to mind from your post:
1) The Russian student’s comment about mentorship being unknown in Russia is closer to the norm globally than you’d think. The US is truly unique from a mentorship standpoint. I’ve found mentorship does exist in Europe and Japan, but far less the US. I’ve had direct experience with mentorship being a completely new concept in many regions – Middle East, Africa, SE Asia. In fact how to tailor our mentor-driven accelerator model to markets outside the US/EU is something I consider on a daily basis.
2) Mentees must seek out mentors, but mentors need to be receptive. There’s no formal application process required – simply seeking advice and asking questions is the key. I wonder how many times the Russian student has sought advice of someone older and wiser? It’s hard to believe if they did their questions were completely dismissed. Human nature is typically more helpful than not.
My guess is a mentor had never directly come to this student with an offer to help, yet the student didn’t realize it’s their prerogative to approach first. Odds are the most successful Russians have mentors because they sought them out, yet proportionately fewer mentor/mentee relationships exist than in the US/EU so the ‘mentorship culture’ has not formed.
3) In my experience mentees have a common trait of considering advice but not necessarily taking it. No mentor wants a mentee who agrees with them all the time… hero worship works for an hour but doesn’t form a relationship. The mentees I enjoy being around not only consider my advice, but have smart responses that make me think. This is why I personally mentor – because I can learn something as well as help someone.
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