Mentors, Advisors, Advocates (and Allies)

Your job is not your career

In your job, you most likely have a supervisor or manager, someone who tells you what to do or where to focus your efforts. A good manager builds a team that works effectively towards larger organizational goals. A great manager knows your personal goals, strengths, and growth opportunities, and helps you identify work that will simultaneously support org and personal progress. If things go very well, you might be grateful to your manager. If things fall apart, you might blame them.

In your career, you are the only one in charge. The job that you have today, no matter how much you love or hate it, is one step in your career. Your manager today will only remain a force in your career if you want them to. In this post, I want to share how I think about my career mentors, advisors and advocates. I define each role and the benefits of filling it. I recommend that you start a Note today to list who fills the roles for you, and send some emails or coffee chat invitations as soon as you’re able.

Tip - people are often honored to receive an email for a mentoring relationship, so don’t be shy.

Key Takeaways

• You are the only constant throughout your career.
• Keep a list of your mentors, advisors and advocates.
• If your current list is lacking, put time into relationship building.
  • You can be direct. Ask for advice or a specific relationship type.
• Make a plan for how to keep up with the people on your list regularly over the years.

Mentors

• What is their role?
  • Grow together with you. Share ideas and lessons learned. They are like a multiplier on your experiences.
• Who are they?
  • Peer-mentors are folks on similar paths to yours, you might meet in school or at work
  • Mentors can also be a bit senior to you
  • May be at your company, in your management structure
  • May be beyond your org or company
• Connecting with them
  • Fairly often, bi-weekly or monthly discussions
  • Should schedule it, to remind you to connect
• What topics, and what’s the benefit?
  • Informal, casual connections - what are you going through?
  • Spark ideas that are technical or career focused
  • Reminds you that the world is bigger than your specific job
  • You can complain to peer mentors (and they are the only ones on the list for whom that’s true)
• Who are your mentors today?
  • Take a second to write down a few names.
  • Are you meeting with your favorite ones often enough?
  • Are you doing one another the service of sharing your job lessons and frustrations?
  • Are there any gaps or openings in your roster? How can you meet more or cultivate more of this relationship?

Advisors

• What is their role?
  • Support your entire career journey, offer advice and an outside perspective. Advisors are not at your company or in your org, and thus won’t be biased by what your current job needs. They will share their lessons learned and stories from their career.
• Who are they?
  • Senior to you, further along in a career that is similar to one that you can imagine pursuing
  • Can be family members, or friends of family members
  • Someone you met at a conference and stayed in touch with, maybe after you asked questions about their talk
  • Former managers or leaders in past jobs that you’ve had
• Connecting with them
  • Fairly rare, quarterly or 2x/year
  • Should schedule it, to remind you to connect
• What topics, and what’s the benefit?
  • Get some advice, but do not complain.
  • Bigger picture conversations about your career.
  • Prepare for these! Think ahead about what you want to discuss, where a fresh perspective will help you.
  • Examples: Positioning yourself for a new challenge or role, deciding whether you like your role or whether it’s time to move on, interpersonal or political challenges that you are facing, strategies to balance work with life, salary negotiation and interview prep, connecting you to new opportunities, sometimes helps me to clarify my thoughts and feel more relieved and confident about my choice.
• Who are your advisors today?
  • Take a second to write down a few names, if you have any.
  • Who do you call when you need some advice? Would it help to talk with them about your path more regularly?
  • Are you doing yourself the service of learning more about their path, however different from yours it may be?
  • Are there any gaps or openings in your roster? How can you meet more or cultivate more of this relationship?

Advocates

• What is their role?
  • Advocates are people who can speak up for you when you are not in the room. If your work is being discussed, they have the seniority and respect to be part of the discussion. They also understand your strengths enough that they will speak up for you, represent your ideas faithfully, or think to suggest that you be included in the discussion.
• Who are they?
  • Senior to you and in your management chain, at your current company
  • Well-respected by decision makers in your chain of command
• Connecting with them
  • Very rare, annual or less for 1:1, but connections may be limited to larger meeting settings
  • Typically this is someone in your leadership, who you present to more frequently, but is too busy for deep 1:1 connections.
  • Try this: If there is a senior person in a meeting or who comes to your poster/presentation, reach out to them afterwards and ask for a coffee chat.
  • Make the meeting count, regardless of whether it’s a 1:1 or a larger meeting
• What topics, and what’s the benefit?
  • Prepare! How do you want this person to see you?
    • This is different for everyone. Maybe you want to be someone they call when hard technical problems arise, or when a team isn’t getting along or running efficiently. Maybe you want to be the go-to person for telling a clear technical story to non-technical stakeholders.
    • If you want a larger role, your advocate needs to know that.
• Who are your advocates today?
  • Take a second to write down a few names, if you have any. If you don’t have any, who are your options?
  • How can you convert those people into advocates for you?
    • What do you want them to think of you, or to say about you, behind closed doors?
    • How can you stand out and show that strength at the next opportunity?

Allies (bonus section)

• What is their role?
  • Unlike the others on this list, allies can be transient. You can ally with someone to achieve a specific goal that you both want, but don’t necessarily need to meet repeatedly throughout your career.
• Who are they?
  • This could be anyone! A peer on another team, a manager, a friend in a board game.
• Connecting with them
  • Identifiy your allies! We miss a lot of opportunities to make our lives just a bit better if we don’t identify common goals with people who are coming from different angles. Your ally doesn’t have to be your friend, you don’t have to have all the same goals, you just need to find a way to align behind one common goal.
• What topics, and what’s the benefit?
  • Find a common ground, achieve a goal that you both want, and then move on
  • You cannot treat an ally like an employee. You have to identify their motivations and yours and figure out how both can benefit from some common goal.
  • On our team, we have allied with folks on MLR, AI/ML, and student researchers.
• Who are your allies today, and what goals are you pursuing?
  • For each ally/goal - what are their motivations, and how do they differ from yours?