Mentorship: If Not You, Then Who?

Take a moment whether you’re at your desk, at home, or reading this on your phone, and start thinking about the people you interact with professionally. Your boss, your bosses boss, your former boss, your staff, your colleagues, your competitors. A mental rolodex of the people you spend the majority of your career interacting with. Now, out of this group of people, start to reflect on these questions: Who do you admire? Who do you respect? What are some of the qualities about this person that leads you to raise them to such an elevated assessment?

Honesty. Integrity. Emotional Intelligence. Kindness. Communication. Leadership. Maybe none of these qualities at all; maybe you just admire them because they are a force of nature who takes names, kicks a$$, and makes a lot of money. That’s fine too.

Now ask yourself, who admires YOU?

Are you really doing your part to be a mentor and a role model to the people you spend your professional life with?

Asset management is a tough and grinding game and it’s much easier to complain and shift the responsibility of being a mentor to someone else. The thought of small talk over lunch or coffee with someone asking you what it takes to “make it.” YAWN.

Even if you do engage in the token monthly coffee chat, you don’t cultivate admiration or enrich the professional lives of those around you with a canned line about “working hard towards success.”

So, then, how is mentorship done?

1. Tap your existing network and devote time to expanding it. Organically seek out mentors and mentees and take deliberate time to cultivate these relationships. Stop thinking of it as a chore and start thinking about it as an active choice. Pencil it in your calendar and hold yourself accountable to following through.

2. Give honest feedback. Write a note or pick up the phone when you take notice of a job well done. Conversely, don’t shy away from constructive criticism! You’re not helping anyone get better if you’re not willing to have uncomfortable conversations.

3. Solicit honest feedback. This one can be painful and frankly most people don’t do this, or do it enough. Are you really taking the time to ask others what you could be doing better? Could you have handled a meeting differently? Can you improve your approach? What can you tactically do to improve yourself professionally? This doesn’t mean reading your 360-degree reviews from your peers every year and promptly filing it and forgetting about it the next day. This is turning around to your colleague after a meeting and asking for real time feedback.

Be thoughtful about steps you can take to improve yourself (and others around you). When you look back on your professional career, how do you want to measure yourself? By the people who measure themselves by you.