What is Your Role as a Mentor

As a mentor, your role is to guide and support your mentee to help them achieve their personal or career goals. But's that's pretty abstract, so what exactly does this mean? 🤔

• You have more experience in the industry than your mentee does. As a result, you have a wealth of knowledge about how your industry works and what helped you get where you are now. Your job is to share this experience with your mentee.

• As someone who has been where your mentee is now, you know what the common challenges are that juniors typically fall into. By sharing your experience, you can help them avoid these challenges.

• A mentor should also serve as a thinking partner for the mentee. Often it is incredibly useful just to have someone to bounce ideas against - someone to ask the questions that you yourself have not thought of yet so that you are able to think more creatively about decisions or actions.

• In the same vein, your role as a mentor is also to challenge your mentee's assumptions as well as to provide feedback that they need to hear in order to grow.

• You should also provide your mentee with recommendations for resources that they may find helpful, such as books, events, webinars, or communities.

• Lastly, your role as a mentor is to be a cheerleader as your mentee works on their goals. This means encouraging them to move out of their comfort zones and try new things, supporting them when things don't go as planned, and celebrating successes when they do! 🎉