Mentorship: A Two-Way Street

One of my goals is to be a mentor of sorts to you—someone who can guide you through growth as a project manager with a minimal time commitment on your part every week. And I can fit anywhere in your schedule!

But I hope you also look for in-person mentors. While I have had a few formal and informal mentors in the past, I have just started seeking more project management mentoring relationships. So far I have bumped into one significant mentoring insight that will forever drive how I approach it:

Mentorship feels more authentic when you start with the assumption that it will be a two-way street and that you will both be learning from each other.

In my first formal mentoring relationship with a project manager (arranged through my local PMI chapter), I was designated the mentee, and the other person was the mentor. I was matched with this mentor because in his job, he had a specific type of experience I was interested in learning about. But in the course of our relationship, I learned he was about to move to a job in a totally different industry—the industry I was working in at the time. In the course of our 3 months of meeting, he spent just as much time picking my brain as I did picking his. I was delighted and surprised that I had something so significant to offer my “mentor.”

More recently I was paired with a “mentee” and we learned we’ve both had about the same amount of experience in project management. At the mentorship kickoff event, the two of us stayed late and chatted with the mentorship program organizer. He asked us for feedback. At almost the same time in the conversation, my “mentee” and I landed on the idea that our mentoring relationship would feel more authentic if we approached it as a two-way street and just assumed we’d both be mentoring each other. We’ve now met twice and exchanged a few emails, and again, it has been a very mutual experience.

I just find it takes away some of the sense of uncomfortable expectation around mentorship (“What am I supposed to prepare as a mentor?” “What am I supposed to ask as a mentee?”) if you assume you are both humans with experience who have something to offer each other. You likely WILL both help each other, so why not set that expectation from the beginning, and take the pressure off that either of you has to be anything more than helpful to the human in front of you in whatever ways you can?

I am considering starting a regular project management meetup/group mentoring experience with several project manager colleagues in my area, and I picture that group having the same expectation—a few of us may be organizers, but everyone can share the responsibility of bringing things to the table to help each other, however it comes up.

Surely there will be exceptions to this, and if somebody has a lot of mentoring experience, or if one person is clearly much farther in their career than the other, a more traditional mentoring experience may be the right fit.

But if you are interested in mentorship and “finding a mentor” feels awkward, how does the idea of starting a mutual “mentoring partnership” feel? Maybe it will open the door for you to share ideas with someone in a way that feels more natural.