We all know how great it can be to have a professional mentor. For that reason, the advice we hear about mentorship often focuses on ways people can find mentors and maintain good relationships with them.

But the flip side is equally important: What does it take to be a good mentor?

Mentoring can be a highly rewarding experience. But ensuring that your mentee is getting something truly useful out of the relationship is not always straightforward. So, today we’ll get some advice from our faculty about how to mentor well.

What It Takes to Be a Good Mentor
First, you need to set the stage for a good mentor–mentee dynamic, explains Diane Brink, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing.

“The whole idea behind the mentoring relationship is that it’s a penalty-free environment,” she says. If you haven’t established that sort of trusting relationship, where both mentor and mentee are comfortable speaking freely, then your mentee may not be open with you about everything they’re considering or struggling with.

Once you’ve laid that groundwork, here are some other tips for how to make this a fruitful relationship.

Let the mentee take the lead: A good mentor makes it clear that their mentee is in charge of their own career, Brink says. Being a mentor is less about telling mentees exactly what to do—only they can decide that—and more about showing up for them, listening to them, and offering nonjudgmental support. “As a mentor, your role is to help guide and facilitate how that individual solves a problem or tackles an opportunity,” she says. “You’re asking questions and providing context for greater clarity. You’re not the person who’s going to have all the answers.”

Don’t avoid tough conversations: No one likes giving negative feedback. But if that feedback would be constructive to your mentee, then you should offer it, explains Carter Cast, a clinical professor of strategy. He recalls how a senior VP at a Fortune 50 technology firm called him to tell him that their conversations from a decade earlier about his inability to partner well with others had been crucial to his career development. “Thinking back, those conversations were so uncomfortable for both of us. But I think he realized later that I wouldn’t have gone through the discomfort if I didn’t care about his development. He wasn’t a lost cause. He was just missing an ingredient—the ability to enlist the support of others effectively—and he had to go find it,” Cast says.

Teach skills, but go beyond that: The mentors who have the biggest positive impact on the success of their mentees tend to be highly skilled and very successful themselves, according to a study by professor Brian Uzzi and colleagues. Their analysis of the careers of more than 37,000 scientist mentors and mentees showed that having a mentor who is at the top of their game improves a mentee’s odds of ultimately becoming a superstar themselves by nearly sixfold. And the recipe for good mentorship goes beyond specific technical skills or subject-matter expertise; it includes tacit knowledge of how groundbreaking work is ideated and produced. This highlights the importance of mentors and mentees working through problems together, rather than simply ensuring that discrete skills are mastered.

You can hear more from our professors on mentorship here and here.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“Someone could be the nicest person in the world—they just happen to like designer scarves. And all of a sudden, you’re judging them as if they might be a little less trustworthy.”

—Professor Derek D. Rucker in Insight, on how wearing luxury clothes can sometimes hurt your chances of getting hired.