Reframing the Picture

What role should a mentor play in the career and professional development of a mentee?

I’ve had so many mentors. Starting with the one that described to me why my linear career thinking was not right. But done right, it can change the career trajectory, like, right? And it’s like done right, I think a lot of it is, really helping through whatever their own experiences and whatever their own background is, to maybe reframe pictures for people.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, we come from, at least I did, I think the educational process has changed significantly since my German school days, but I came from an environment that was fairly binary; that’s right, that’s wrong, that’s A, that’s F. Our educational process was fairly quantized, if you want to call it, right? Like these are the three…There’s not an infinite number of choices, there’s A, B, C, D, a multiple choice question was four, maybe five choices, right? So…

And a lot of it is very rote, it doesn’t really encourage innovative thinking, outside the box thinking.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think the ones I appreciated the most were mentors, trying to reframe it. Reframe how you think about careers, how do you think about, you know, maybe somebody is trying to figure out their role within a particular job, but how does that…? But how do you frame what’s going on? Like, I want to be a test… they want to be a manager managing tests at the time. I mean, something as simple as a mentor coming in and is like, every job in this company is important to the company, because companies don’t invest in functions that aren’t important. And so, that could really reframe, it’s like okay, what do I not know about this job?