Shelly shares what she learned about mentorship during her career at IBM. She argues for having many mentors rather than one, and explains how mentorship eventually shifts into sponsorship as your career advances.
I learned a great lesson relatively early in my career. Probably, I don't know, six years into my career or something like that, I was at IBM, and IBM decided that high potential employees they wanted to make sure had mentors. And so they decided that they're going to ask the employees, who would you like to be your mentor? Because a lot of other ways don't work. So fine, I get the request. Who do you want to be a mentor? Well, I picked a gentleman by the name of Roland Harris. Roland was somebody a couple levels above me. I knew him, I thought he liked me. Said, great. Well, a couple days later I get a call. It's Roland Shelly. Hi, Roland. Shelly, you put my name down to be your mentor. And I'm thinking, well, yeah, Roland, I thought you liked me. And he says, shelly, you've got me, go get somebody else. And I went, oh. So that taught me a couple things. One, I had mentors I didn't even know, right, because they weren't formal. We never had a conversation about it. And number two, if I can have one, I can have two, I can have three, I can have as many mentors as possible. And so that's what I started doing. I said, all right, fine, I'm going to go get a bunch of mentors. And I also learned don't ask people because they're going to typically say no because they don't have time and they don't think you're going to be a good mentee, which you're probably not. And we'll talk. We can talk about that if you want to, Tina. But what I did is I adopted mentors. I just started treating them like mentors. When I realized that Roland was actually a mentor and I didn't know it, I said, oh, okay. So I would just start asking people simple, easy questions or advice. And then I always followed up. And that's the key. You have to follow up. The mentors need something too. This is not a one way thing. This is a relationship. So you need to get value and give value. And the biggest value you can give a mentor, frankly, is appreciation, is knowledge that intrinsically they helped because most people want to help deep within them. So go adopt mentors. Have as many as you can possibly support. And then what happens a lot of times is as you work hard and do well and rise, many mentors can become sponsors because now they want to claim you. It's like, oh, yeah, Shelly, oh yeah, I've been giving her advice on the side, right? This is all me, you know, but they do, and they'll open doors for you. So I've had many a mentor turn into a sponsor.
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