You should be a mentor, starting right now

Ok, so we’ve talked about why you should recruit mentors as you develop your own ability to get your job done better/faster/stronger. That’s pretty safe stuff.

But here’s something you don’t hear nearly as often: you should be a mentor, starting now.

Start at the beginning

Most of us think as mentoring as an activity that benefits the person being mentored, and it does. But mentors know that there is a strong selfish motivation to helping someone else along. The best way to make sure you really understand something is to teach it to someone else.

When you are just starting to develop your career you are spending most of your time learing—learning how your company works, learning how your team works, learning which Coke machine doesn’t eat dollar bills. The best way to cement this information in your own head is to start passing it along to the new person who just joined the team. Even if she only joined 2 weeks after you started, you know things she doesn’t, and she can use your help.

When you move beyond helping your new charge with the functional basics of the new job you might find yourself in a position to start answering harder questions. Issues of prioritization, company goals, and advice on how to deal with a specific crisis. This is an excellent chance to examine your own store of leadership and career information and try to apply it to someone else’s situation. In so doing you’ll have the chance to benefit twice.

First, if you haven’t already dealt with this type of situation you’ll have the opportunity to learn something new for yourself. Second, if you have already built up a store of knowledge on this topic you’ll have the chance to examine and refine it, making it stronger the next time you need it to solve one of your own problems.

And keep on going

After you’ve already begun to establish yourself, and even after you’ve moved into senior leadership, it’s still a great idea to keep mentoring, even if it’s only an informal thing (like a lunch once a month with a few of the new staff members). This is your chance to give back to the system that’s helped make you successful, and to make sure that there’s someone around to keep things going after you move on.

But you’ll also find, again, that this is a valuable time to reflect on your own experiences and develop new abstractions and ways of looking at what you do, and how you do it.

There’s even a good chance you’ll get back more than you put in. Particularly as you advance beyond mid-level management you’ll find yourself rubbing shoulders with the Old and the Crusty. These are the folks who get stuff done—and may even be doing a great job—but they are ordinarily pretty jaded in general.

Hanging around all this crustiness all the time can really start to harsh your mellow. That’s when it’s a good idea to touch base with someone at the beginning of their career and dip your toe into their giant pool of enthusiastic idealism.

Even short, causal mentoring sessions can remind you why you started doing all this in the first place and help you avoid stagnating under the weight of the daily grind. And bonus: these visits can help to keep you in touch with what’s going on on the ground, giving you a glimpse into details that you would usually miss as you fly from high level customer briefings to shareholder meetings.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.