CHAPTER 20
Your Career Needs Many Mentors, Not Just One
by Dorie Clark
These days everyone knows that finding a mentor is valuable. But it’s increasingly rare that we actually have one. In an in-depth study of professional service firms, Harvard Business School professor Thomas DeLong and his colleagues discovered: “Everyone we spoke with over age 40 could name a mentor in his or her professional life, but younger people often could not.” They noted, “Junior professionals joining a firm 20 years ago could count on the partners treating them like protégés.” Today, job turnover, layoffs, and increased bottom-line pressures have taken a hatchet to that “implicit agreement.” The answer isn’t to give up on finding a mentor, however—it’s to broaden ...
Get HBR Guide to Your Professional Growth now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
