Why You Too May Need A Mentor

There was a time, not long ago, when we used the word mentor in a very specific way. A mentor was someone a bit older and wiser, someone whose chronological maturity provided the mentee — the recipient of the mentor’s experience, knowledge, and wisdom — something they could never get before becoming, yes, as old as the mentor.

Today, we still often use the word this way. But recently our view on the role has become more expansive.

I think this is a good thing, though the causes for our more expansive view may have may have confused us. The recent craze for mentoring is the product of several converging forces. And despite the enthusiasm from entrepreneurs — witness the emergence mentoring networks in recent years — not quite everyone has been prepared for it. A new age of mentoring is upon us, but for some of us it feels like it’s being forced upon us.

Acceleration of technology

As many folks in my network know, mentoring has been on my mind for quite some time. It came to a head, for me, about four years ago, at a time in my life when I was becoming acutely aware that I was learning as much from younger folks than I was learning from people I thought were my mentors. This probably happens to everyone reaching the last decades of their professional life. But the rapid acceleration of technologies that organizations like Singularity University (SU) have been speaking about are making it impossible to keep learning without reaching across younger generational divides.

One could argue that this is nothing new. It’s basically the same phenomenon that management consultant Don Tapscott wrote about in 2008 in Grown Up Digital, a book inspired by watching his two children “use complex technologies like computers, video games, and VCRs with seemingly no effort.” But if you accept SU’s premise that technologies are accelerating exponentially not linearly — and that some technologies that we are not even aware of today are likely to crest in our lifetime — the burden of crossing generation divides to learn and adapt is becoming more real. Adding to the burden: for the first time ever, millennials outnumber boomers. The news just broke in 2015, but I suspect that the reaction from marketers, HR, and other professionals won’t come until 2016.

Acceleration of learning

Over the last few years, I’ve watched this phenomenon formalize into new practices in the workplace, like reverse mentoring. Another new practice: cross-cultural learning, where the asset is another kind of intellectual diversity. From where I sit — an advisor to executives on leadership and growth strategies — the formalization of cross-generational, cross-cultural learning are best practices, things that can be taught with the support of collaboration technologies. Several years ago, as a consultant for Deloitte, I watched as dozen of businesses in the Fortune 1000 quickly adopted new platforms to help their entire organizations “grow up digital” together. Though awkward for many senior folks in the early days, the rise of learning communities in the enterprise helped many people form the new habit of learning from others no matter how old they were, no matter what station they occupied. What matters most in these internal communities — which back then were supported by platforms like Yammer and today by newer platforms like Slack — is the credibility of the knowledge sharer and the curiosity of the knowledge seeker. Both sharing and seeking are rewarded — and sometimes even gamified — in learning communities.

The pressure on the top

Of course, not every senior professional has followed the path of social learning. I have met a number of executives over the past two generations — since the dawn of the social web — who have proudly sworn off the platform as a place where they might learn. For them, visiting any online platform — if they were to visit at all — has been more of an opportunity to share their views than to seek the view of others. In other words, the platforms have been a place to teach and to mentor rather than a place to be the mentee.

Nothing wrong with execs mentoring others. Teaching, as I’ve written before, is one of the fastest paths to learning. But the reality is that practically all executives need advice from people who are wiser if not older. And the need to learn is especially real today, in the age of exponential change. Just as the rate of accelerating technology is forcing organizations to change, the rate of accelerating learning is forcing leaders to change and get more comfortable with the role of seeking. Whether it happens online, or offline (the preferred modality for many senior execs), it needs to happen. It’s part of the new mandate for change and growth. Senior execs too will need to grow.

But it doesn’t need to be lonely at the top. There have always been, and there will continue to be — especially in the new age of mentoring — other people who can help you take it all in, comprehend, and appreciate the view.

And that, my friends, is what mentors are for: delivering minds — and peace of mind — when they are most needed.