The Guide to Finding an Amazing Mentor

So you have a terrible manager. So what?

Whether looking to climb the corporate ladder, make a name surfing the freelance wave, or cut their teeth at a startup, many young professionals today find themselves without direction, guidance, or the ammunition needed to shoot for their goals.

But let’s step back for a second, because this “grey” area doesn’t simply go away with age. Fifty-one percent of all employees actively looked for a new job last year, and for the majority, it wasn’t to make more money, but to “allow [them] to do their best.”

Even worse, more and more people (50.8 percent) report being disengaged with their jobs, just showing up to kill time.

Neither of these statistics looks particularly promising for young people who are either recently employed or looking to enter the job market and find satisfying work.

At the same time, expectations are high. The human tendency to rely on availability heuristics—mental shortcuts that tap into immediate examples to help us make sense of something—leads everyone to believe it’s plausible to become the next Mark Zuckerberg (or at least work for him), given the disproportionate amount of media attention entrepreneurs and business owners of such status receive.

This is from Zak Slayback’s keen critique of the myth that all the young people out there are becoming entrepreneurs:

“Young people today grew up in a weird paradoxical world of being rewarded for everything and being instilled with an intense fear of failure.”

Is today’s educational philosophy capable of producing the future leaders needed to reverse these numbers?

To make the outlook even more macabre, Jim Clifton, Gallup’s CEO, recently penned an article describing a study that quantified the proportion of potential successful entrepreneurs coming through the education system at 2 percent. In his article, he calls on cities around the world to devote more resources to this elite group.

What about the rest of us, Jim?

Most of us came up through the same standardized education system, which agreeably needs an update. But upon arrival in the workplace or job market, many of us find the more-standardized practices to which we became accustomed in our educational life… unappealing.

It’s all too easy to settle for just having a job, especially one that offers a nice retirement plan. But we all want meaningful work.

What I’ve outlined thus far could be called a case for the death of spirit in the workplace. But it’s not dead — simply dormant. So, what’s the path out of stagnation? I’ll show below why my initial experience working for a small, growing ecommerce agency points to mentorship as a potential avenue of escape and revitalization.

Bottom up

It’s a unique pleasure of working in ecommerce that I get to spend a large amount of time interacting with and learning about a plethora of businesses of varying sizes, ages, and operating models.

Some are dynamic, while some are rigid, and it’s not a stretch to say that working with businesses of various magnitudes reveals a wide variability in organizational temperance. Traditionally, larger businesses have been able to encode greater amounts of information—which positively affects their capacity to produce and scale products. But they most often do this at the price of efficiency.

That’s not to say that small businesses are always efficient. And while inefficiency isn’t always a bad thing, I have observed how it can correlate directly with frustration—and even lead to some less-than-delightful situations.

One such occurrence happened when our point of contact in a large, unnamed enterprise client continually miscommunicated our scheduled deadlines and scope of work to their governing board. Whether overcompensating for the red-tape-induced delays on their end or simply attempting to get noticed for a promotion, our contact’s behavior put personal profit before the product and, in turn, the product before the people involved with its creation. Needless to say, the situation ended poorly for all parties.

Compare this to most companies we’re fortunate to work with. Their teams are typically smaller and more flexible, and in interacting with them, it’s evident that their founders are always contributing to discussions in constructive ways without micromanaging. The key difference here can be expressed in simple terms: Undesirable and often unsuccessful partnerships seem to stem from situations in which people are working for their superiors, rather than with their superiors.

Anyone can point out that this borders on stating the obvious, but the fact of the matter is still that many employees, across industries and business models, fail to interact with their bosses, managers, or founders in meaningful ways.

Enter: mentorship.

The student creates the master

The practice of mentorship in small businesses and startups—as we generally know it—owes its legacy to the indentured apprenticeships of old. But the type of mentorship I’m talking about wasn’t seriously considered by American learning theorists until a smart psychologist named Albert Bandura decided in the 1970s that behaviorism (the dominant theory at the time, and even today) was, simply, too simple.

“Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt.

“Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.

“Very good answer.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

If you’re like me, then school taught you what to know for the test—but you were on the hook for just exactly how to learn it.

This is expected, because education as we know it was founded on the principles of behaviorism. So, you studied. Behaviorism calls this conditioning, and it works: Study all week, take the test, pass or fail, adjust and repeat. Behaviorism is so ingrained in education because it simplifies every learned behavior (and every behavior, according to the theory) into inputs and outputs.

But this approach blatantly ignores the internal processes in between the inputs and the outputs that make us inherently human. So Bandura upgraded the black-and-white, positive-and-negative-reinforcement theory of behaviorism to account for mediating factors, such as intent and observation. Yes, common sense would have us believe that we could learn by observing the experience of others, but before Bandura’s social learning theory built on the behaviorist theory of mindless conditioning, this was not considered an academically valid approach.

Bandura claimed that children learned specific behaviors by imitation, and he theorized that they did this automatically. So, how can you extract more knowledge and knowhow out of everyday work than your typical training program or course? Be a child, and do it deliberately. Outside of a laboratory, automatic conditioning is simply too slow and unreliable. Chances are, any given training program taught you the knowledge you needed to be effective, but not the knowhow needed to actually employ it successfully.

Rocket Code is built around this type of social learning. The office is structured to promote strong relationships between young, emerging professionals and skilled leaders in their respective fields. Take, for example, the practice of organizing desks into clusters where a junior software developer is always located within casual talking distance of a senior front-end engineer.

Close proximity allows for more efficient communication, which helps build the foundations of solid professional and personal relationships.

The result is an office that is saturated with competition. But this competition is about beating the collective “yesterday” and evolving together, rather than individuals competing for the next rung on the ladder.

To be fair, not all offices are created equal, and RC is certainly not an entrepreneurial utopia. Fortunately, there are steps we can take to get the most growth out of each day.

Optimizing attitude and avoiding pitfalls

The key is achieving the right mindset to absorb, learn, and utilize the wealth of information around you. Picture mentors as checkpoints on the path ahead, as plateaus on a mountain, or simply as goals. Except they are not static points in space, but actual humans, dynamic leaders with whom you can lean in together.

Don’t have anyone to look up to for inspiration in your company? Sounds like you’re already part of the disengaged employee population, or heading that way. But don’t fret, because recognizing this is the first step to growth. And the change starts within you.

So you have a terrible boss or manager. So what? So has virtually everyone at some point in their career. Even radically successful C-level executives don’t see eye to eye with each other on every decision. (This makes companies great, yay.). But they didn’t get there by choosing to slack off when their ineffective managers could take all the blame, because learning what not to do can be more important than having a paragon manager who never makes mistakes.

Let others make mistakes, so you don’t have to—then learn from them. It’s harder than it sounds, and it takes a disciplined student mentality to intentionally identify and segment out the bad behaviors to avoid and the good ones to replicate, from not only one person, but from any and everyone around you. Seriously. Even the intern you boss around can do at least one thing better than you can, and the venture capitalist who wrote the next bible has made way more mistakes than you have at this point. Learn from all of them.

By priming your mind to recognize certain behaviors that your mentors employ in successful ways, you can then practice them to develop your own skills. The goal is to walk the fine line between mindless imitation and deliberate practice. The former may help your short-term value, but the latter will allow you to develop a stellar skill set that is entirely you.