Episode 7: 3 types of mentors everyone should have

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I went from SDR to Sr. Manager running pricing in 4 years. Every new job and promotion came from the help of mentors.

My mentors reviewed my content to help me get clearer with my writing and helped me think through potential objections or questions from leaders on projects. One of my mentors is why I pivoted from my role in product marketing to running the competitive function at Grafana Labs - she suggested it when I wasn’t even in the room.

Today we will cover how to figure out the ‘who’ for your mentors and next week we will dive deeper on the ‘how’ including templates and same conversation topics.

💎 Advice on what types of mentors to have

3 types of mentors everyone should have: a mentor, thought partner, and sponsor (separate from your board of directors).

1. Mentor: At or above your level (similar function) 

   • This is someone who knows your discipline or is in the function you want to be in next

   • You spend time knowledge sharing what projects they work on, offer to give feedback, and learn how they operate

   • Take these lessons, apply them to your own role and share the feedback on how it went with your mentor

2. Thought partner: At or above your level (same function)

   • This is someone who shares the same ambitions or interests as you that you can continuously bounce ideas off of. This could be someone on your team or in a different department or even a different company.

   • Knowledge share with these folks, review work together, brainstorm together. These are people who complement your weaknesses and vice versa.

3. Sponsor: At the highest level at your company

   • This is typically a VP or C-suite. Executives at companies are effectively resource allocators. When you are working on projects that affect the business, you will work with execs to get resources from a team or multiple teams.

   • Finding an executive who can help sponsor you by unblocking you, helping secure resources, or promoting your work to get you on what’s most important for the business is key. You should have more than one sponsor if possible across functions.

Having different types of mentors also gives you practice in tailoring the altitude of your conversation and switching context. E.g. if your thought partner is at a different company than you, practice sharing just the right amount of context so they can help.

As your with your board, these folks can evolve based on your needs and you can have people in multiple roles and multiple roles with a single person.

As always, feedback is a gift and I welcome any/all feedback on this newsletter - good or bad. See ya next week 👋 

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✨ Special thank you to Gigi Marquez who suggested I start this newsletter 🙏