The Manager's Handbook

14Finding and Using Mentors

A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.

—Oprah Winfrey

When I was an early investor and on the board of Asurion, which grew to several billion dollars in revenue, I watched how its CEO, Kevin Taweel, used his network of mentors as a key factor in his company's success. “The number one reason for where we are today,” he later told me, “is that I surrounded the company with great advisors, and then we used them voraciously.” As a business leader, you'll face very few unique problems. Generally, the answer, or a framework to find the answer, already exists. While less secure managers want to solve everything themselves, the most confident leaders know better. Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, underscores Kevin's experience when Branson wrote, “If you ask any successful businessperson, they will always have had a great mentor at some point along the road.”

Mary Barra, the chief executive officer of General Motors, points out that the best leaders create a network of advisors. “Some executives credit one or two key people for coaching them to success, but I believe effective mentoring takes a network.”¹ Mentors and advisors come from different perspectives, and the best managers seek and take advice from multiple sources, then reconcile differences—and note commonalities—before choosing the best path forward. Creating this network, though, does not come organically. To build the type of network like those ...