Nearly everything written on this subject addresses the senior person. The junior party is treated as a recipient, which understates their influence considerably.
The difference between a mentoring relationship that transfers something and one that produces pleasant conversation is mostly determined by what the junior person brings to it.
Bring a situation, not a topic
The most common failure is arriving with nothing specific and expecting the senior person to generate content.
Asked how things are going, a senior person will produce general reflection, because that is what the question permits. General reflection is the least valuable thing they hold.
Arrive instead with a decision you are facing or one you have just made. Here is the situation, here is what I know, here is what I am inclined to do, and here is what I am unsure about. That question unlocks the specific material — the comparable cases, the thing you have not considered, the way this usually goes.
Preparation of about ten minutes changes the value of the hour by more than any other variable in the relationship.
Describe it accurately, including your part
The temptation is to present a version in which you behaved reasonably and the difficulty came from elsewhere. It is natural and it makes the exercise worthless.
A mentor reasoning from a curated account will produce advice fitted to a situation that does not exist. They may notice the omission and will rarely say so, because pressing a junior person on what they have left out is uncomfortable and they are not obliged to.
The specific thing worth including is the part where you handled it badly. That is where the useful advice lives, and it is the only material the senior person cannot get from anywhere else.
Close the loop
The single most neglected obligation, and the one that most determines whether a senior person keeps investing.
Go back and say what you did and what happened. Including when you did something else: I thought about what you said and went the other way, here is why, and here is how it turned out.
That is not a courtesy. Advice given into silence teaches the senior person that their input disappeared, and people stop spending effort on things that produce no evidence of having mattered.
Disagreeing and explaining why is also, reliably, the conversation senior people find most interesting. It is the point at which the relationship stops being instruction and becomes something closer to an exchange.
Do not outsource the decision
A distinction that determines whether the relationship builds anything.
Asking what should I do transfers the decision. You may get a good answer, and you will not have built judgment, because judgment comes from deciding under exposure and you have just avoided the exposure.
Asking what am I not seeing keeps the decision yours while extracting what the senior person actually has, which is the cases and considerations you lack.
A person who has followed a mentor’s instructions for three years has three years of their mentor’s judgment applied to their situations, and none of their own.
Ask for the specific thing
Covered elsewhere in this subchapter and worth stating from this side.
If what you need is advocacy, ask for advocacy, and accept that the answer may be no or not yet. The vague request produces the cheapest available response, and a year of coffee meetings is what a vague request purchases.
Ask what would have to be true for you to support that. It is uncomfortable, it gives them a legitimate way to decline while remaining useful, and the answer is actionable in a way that encouragement is not.
More than one, and one from outside
A single mentor supplies one perspective, shaped by one career, in one organization, with one set of interests.
The most consequential gap is that a mentor inside your organization cannot advise cleanly on whether you should leave it, take a competing offer, or push for something that would cost them. They may be entirely honourable and they are structurally the wrong counsel for those questions.
Somebody outside — in a comparable role elsewhere, in a professional association, in another sector entirely — supplies what the internal one cannot. In a state where the relevant professional community is small, that person is usually two introductions away.
The obligation you acquire
What you receive here cannot be returned to the person who gave it. They do not need it, and the relationship is not structured to accommodate repayment.
It is discharged by doing the same thing for somebody eight years behind you, at a point when you will be busy and it will be inconvenient and nobody will be tracking whether you did.
That is the entire mechanism by which accumulated judgment moves through a profession, and it holds only because enough people treat it as an obligation rather than as an option.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD