How to Find a Mentor + Why it’s Important: Part One

We recently compiled leadership wisdom from engineering and product leaders into a new handbook and one nugget of wisdom that especially stood out from Jason Lemkin, the CEO of Saastr, and former founder of Echosign is: “What we all still need is trusted help and advice — even the very best do.”

A single career of our own is not enough to learn from every decision or action we take. Therefore, it is critical to learn from the experiences and learnings of others as we grow. What a great mentor can do is contextualize the issues you’re going through, and from there provide practical guidance on how to address any challenges, and find solutions.

So how do you find a Mentor?

One option is within your own company.

Gergely Orosz, an engineering manager for Uber, explains his personal experience:

“As engineering management expectations can be different from company to company, and I work at a larger one, I was keen to find a mentor within the company to start with. However, I didn’t have a clear idea on how exactly this works. I asked for help from my management chain, who in return connected me with people I both look up to and can learn tons from — as well as had the bandwidth to take on another mentee.

Having a mentor — and one who is inside the company, but outside my management chain — has felt very helpful. Because my mentor is further away from what I do, it feels I get independent advice, from a bird’s eye view. However, given my mentor is within the company, they also give me a lot of insight and ideas that are specific to the environment I’m working in. It’s hard to see the effect of mentorship in the short term, but it already gives me additional confidence to have someone I trust to provide me with regular and candid feedback.”

The benefit of having someone within the organization mentoring you is they have context on the organization — its ethos, values, and the environment someone wouldn’t have outside of the organization.

On the other hand, the challenges of having a mentor within the company is, at times, it can be ineffective if an employee feels vulnerable due to concerns about how the feedback may be perceived or concerns the conversation may not be confidential. On a related note, it can be challenging for mentors to separate their allegiance to the company, and to the individual who’s being mentored. Providing advice that is best for the company may not always be appropriate for you on a personal level.

Another challenge is once an employee has built up a relationship of trust with an internal mentor, and has built a strong enough relationship to a point where the mentor becomes a champion for you in the organization, but then exits the company, leaves you feeling empty-handed.

Therefore, an alternative option would be to have external mentors outside of the organization, in addition to champions internally.

External Mentorship

Darragh Curan is currently the VP of Engineering at Intercom. He joined Intercom in early 2012 as a product engineer and was Intercom’s second outside hire. Fast forward to today, and he has scaled the organization into a world class engineering team. Recently on Christian McCarrick’s Simple Leadership podcast, he discussed one of the lessons he learned along the way. “Beyond what I could give are other ways to support and grow managers. Even encouraging them to talk to other people in other companies and to draw on what other people were learning.”

From our experience at Plato, people are often looking for a sounding board from someone with an objective opinion or viewpoint, someone who hasn’t been through the ringer within the organization, but has still navigated through similar challenges they can look to as a trusted advisor.

The challenge of having an external mentor is you have to share your company culture and provide context on the situation to someone who has never experienced life within the company, and in some cases, it can be challenging to find common ground, which can pose a barrier or take time to build trust.

However, going outside of the organization for mentorship can also reap great benefits. People who aren’t concerned or worried about political risks, can be much more transparent, come more prepared, ask better questions, and are much more open to sharing gaps in skills they need to work on with their mentor. Take for instance, Brad Vogel who is a mentor of Plato and mentors over a dozen other engineers and product leaders. He says, “The mentees I have mentored can come from different backgrounds, and are incredibly diverse. Yet the common denominator amongst all of them is they they appreciate having someone listen to their challenges, and be able to have someone provide guidance without being judged.”

One of the advantages of external mentorship is mentors can provide an opportunity to ignore parts of a corporate culture that might limit openness and allow you to be less concerned about saying something politically risky to a senior colleague. This absence of judgment and resulting openness can set the stage for a far more productive mentoring relationship.

If a respected leader offers you guidance, take it! If you have to go seek out a mentor, realize it can take time and requires an investment from both parties to ensure the partnership is successful long term. The benefit of having a mentor, whether internal or external, is they can see your full potential and can help you grow as well as evolve into a sponsor. More specifically, whether you decided to seek an internal or external mentor is completely dependent on your personal situation and career aspiration. Generally, in today’s fast evolving world, it is important to take advantage of all the learning opportunities that are offered to elevate your skills, team, and career.

To read the rest of the handbook and get other actionable insights, you can download our handbook here.

Plato is on a mission to help engineering + product leaders develop soft skills and build better teams. Plato does this through a powerful mentoring platform, where new leaders connect with seasoned professionals for 1–1 sessions, AMAs, and a comprehensive knowledge base.

Plato Mentors have extensive experience in management, and come from top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Netflix, and Spotify — among others.

Founded in 2017 by two French entrepreneurs, Quang Hoang, and Jean-Baptiste Coger who met while attending the prestigious ISAE-Supaero school of engineering, Plato is one of the fastest growing engineering + product mentoring platforms in the world.