Copyright © 2012 Susan L. Colantuono

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Colantuono, Susan Lee

Make the Most of Mentoring: Capitalize on Mentoring and Take Your Career to the Next Level/ Susan L. Colantuono

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-9673129-3-4

1. Mentoring in business—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Career development 3. Women executives 4. Leadership in women 4. Management I. Colantuono, Susan Lee II. Title III. Capitalize on Mentoring and Take Your Career to the Next Level

HF5385.C65 2012

All ASK Leading Women^™ books offer inspiring and
practical solutions for women as they move from
career-start to the C-suite and onto corporate boards.

When you ASK Leading Women, you get cutting-edge content,
ready-to-apply tools, insights from self-assessments, and examples
from successful women who act as your virtual mentors.

Other Books by Susan Colantuono

No Ceiling, No Walls: What women haven’t been told about
leadership from career-start to the corporate boardroom

Build Your Career: Getting Ahead Without Getting Out

Make Room for JOY: Finding Magical Moments in Your Everyday Life

With thanks to Dave Chichester and
Wendy Susco—my first mentors!

Table of Contents

Why Mentoring Isn’t Getting You Where You Want to Go

How to Make the Most of This Book

Part I: Why We Need to Rethink Mentoring

Part II: CAKE and PIE—Two Approaches to Mentoring

Part III: Make the Most of Mentoring

Why Mentoring Isn’t Getting You
Where You Want to Go

Whether you began your career decades ago or just last year, you’ve probably heard that you need a mentor if you want to advance in your career. This advice has been given based on years of research into the important role that mentors play in the career success of executives. This same research has prompted organizations (perhaps even yours) to launch or sustain corporate mentoring programs.

If you’ve listened to and acted on the advice to get a mentor or to participate in your organization’s mentoring program, you likely had a positive experience. However, it’s probably equally likely that your experience didn’t have the impact on your career that you hoped it would. And if you are responsible for a corporate mentoring program, you might well be disappointed with the minimal impact it’s had on women’s advancement.

These experiences raise the question, why isn’t mentoring getting women where they want to go?

I believe the answer is that, for women, mentoring has been less than effective because of how we think about mentoring, the way our thinking influences the structure of corporate mentoring programs and the way it’s shaped the mentoring interactions that most women have. In fact, conventional wisdom about mentoring totally ignores the one skill area women most often lack but most often need in order to advance their careers—what I call The Missing 33%^™. Because of this gap, current paradigms about mentoring seriously underserve women and corporate mentoring programs fall short of their goals.

Over the past few years, through several significant experiences as well as my work with women leaders, I’ve come to the conclusion that the ways we think about and engage in mentoring are flawed, as are the ways we design and implement mentoring programs. (And I can say this with some authority, as I designed corporate mentoring programs in the past.) Ever since I reframed my understanding of mentoring, I’ve been sharing these insights with women across the U.S. and around the globe. Learning to think about mentoring in a new way has helped hundreds of women—and making this shift will be important to you as well.

I’ve written Make the Most of Mentoring to help you shift your thinking whether you are a:

• Woman who wants to grow in her career,
• Man or woman who mentors women or
• Professional who designs and/or manages corporate mentoring programs.

If you fall into any of these categories, Make the Most of Mentoring offers you a profoundly different—and immeasurably more impactful—understanding of mentoring. And, on a practical note, it also offers dozens of concrete tips for being a better protégé or mentor and for enhancing your corporate mentoring program.

What you won’t find in this book is advice to get a mentor, why it’s important to have a mentor or the protocols of a mentoring relationship. This information is amply covered in other books, on the internet and in the materials that accompany most formal mentoring programs. And we at Leading Women cover key information about the protocol of mentoring relationships in our online Be a Mentor/Find a Mentor resources (www.LeadingWomen.biz).

When Providence Business News named me Ally and Mentor for Business Women, I was deeply honored. At the same time I felt compelled to reach beyond my network to mentor other women whose goals are to build flourishing careers. This book is my way of reaching out to help you make the most of mentoring—as a protégé, mentor or person responsible for a corporate program. I sincerely hope that you find it a valuable resource.

How to Make the Most of
This Book

To help you get the greatest return from your time spent reading this book, I strongly encourage you to read it in the order the material is presented:

• Part I explains why it’s essential to rethink mentoring.
• Part II serves up a new recipe for mentoring success.
• Part III is chock full of tips for making the most of mentoring—tips for protégés, mentors and professionals who are responsible for corporate mentoring programs.

If you’re like me, you may be tempted to go right to the tips in Part III. However, to truly capitalize on these tips, you must first shift your thinking about mentoring. That’s why Parts I and II offer a pointed analysis of why we think about mentoring as we do and why we must think about it differently. (And, quite frankly, the tips won’t make much sense without having read Parts I and II.)

In addition to the information about mentoring presented in this book, I’ve posted a number of free resources on my website to help you fully leverage your mentoring relationships and corporate mentoring program. Whenever you see this symbol () throughout the book, it is an indication that you can go to www.MaketheMostofMentoring.com to find a free resource related to the information.

One last note: Please indulge me in a brief comment on language. As an English major, I prefer the more classic word protégé to the more recently coined¹ word mentee to describe “one who benefits from a mentor.”

Now, let’s prepare for a mind shift that will help you Make the Most of Mentoring.

PART ONE

Why We Need to
Rethink Mentoring

“Some people just wait for someone to take them under
their wings, but they should just find someone’s wings
to grab onto. Gaining a mentor is up to you.”

—ANDREA JUNG, CEO

AVON

“Let mentors find you. If you ask someone to be your mentor
and they agree, then they probably aren’t going to push you as
hard as someone who is grooming you for the next level.”

—INDRA NOOYI, CEO

PEPSICO

Conventional Wisdom About
Mentoring

If the quotes on the previous page seem contradictory to you, don’t be surprised. While much current advice about mentoring is valuable, much is also contradictory, confusing and at times unhelpful. In part this is because conventional wisdom about mentoring hasn’t changed much since the 1980s when I first started to help companies design and launch corporate mentoring programs.

Conventional wisdom about mentoring can be summed up as:

• Mentors make a difference in a career.
• Successful men have mentors.
• Women need mentors to get ahead.
• Mentors are trusted confidantes who give you confidence, help you develop skills and guide the steps you take in your career.

To understand why these are today’s core beliefs about mentoring, there are 5 things you need to know about the history of mentoring.

1. Mentoring is Rooted in the Dawn of Time

For all of human history, women and men have prepared girls and boys for their roles in society. They’ve done this informally through stories, role modeling, teaching, advising and rewards and punishments.

The use of the word mentor to describe this informal activity has its roots in the ancient Greek story of Odysseus who, as he sailed off to fight the Trojan wars, left his son Telemachus under the care of his friend Mentor. Since then, the word mentor has come to mean:

1. A wise and trusted counselor or teacher.
2. An influential senior sponsor or supporter.²
3. Someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague.

When you read the word mentor in this book these are the definitions behind it.

2. Modern-Day Mentoring Evolved as an Organizational Tool

Informal mentoring has been an important fixture in organizations. It probably has its roots in the practice of craftsmen taking on apprentices, but we certainly know that it has been a part of industrial organizations. Why has mentoring been so important in organizations?

Mentoring arose as an organization’s informal solution to the need for future leadership. Think of it as an informal process for succession planning. That’s why for centuries, senior men used informal mentoring to groom more junior men to replace them—in other words to fill future supervisory, management or executive vacancies.

Junior employees were groomed to make a contribution to the organization at higher levels; they were not individually groomed for career success. This is a subtle and important distinction. Mentoring might help the individual, but evolved to serve the system.

3. Women Were Left Out of Mentoring Experiences

The relationship between having a mentor and advancing in a career was first noted in the mid-to late 1970s when research found that successful men reported having had mentors (see #2 above). This was the same time that women began entering the workforce with the expectation of building careers.