Mentor Types

Originally published on Tumblr.

I’m new to having mentors. It’s only in the past few years that the idea even crossed my radar. Two reasons for that: (1) I’ve spent most of my career in Europe and Latin America, and (2) I’ve spent most of it as a CTO.

Mentorship is big in the US, and it’s just starting to be accepted in Europe.

Why don’t CTOs need mentorship? They do, but not as much as CEOs. CEOs spend most of their time dealing with the unknown, so being able to talk to people with experience, i.e., people who might have dealt with similar situations, is very, very useful. When a CTO doesn’t know something, he can usually learn about it from a book or a web site.

When I accepted my first CEO role three years ago, my first thought was not: “I’d better go find some good mentors.” That never crossed my mind. It wasn’t until my company joined the TechStars program a year ago that I met my first mentor. I fact, I didn’t meet one, I met 120 over a 3 week period. Slightly intimidating. Definitely overwhelming.

The TechStars folks love to talk about “mentor whiplash”, i.e., having to deal with conflicting advice from multiple mentors. To me it was more like “mentor drowning”. I sometimes felt as if I was being pulled to the bottom of a pool and held there. I didn’t know how to deal with all the advice I was getting.

I eventually figured out why. I learned that to effectively use a mentor, you first need to figure out what kind of mentor you’re dealing with. I’ve found four types: surgeons, sounding boards, shrinks, and blowhards.

I love surgeon mentors. They’re world-class at one thing. If you ask for help with that one thing, they’ll save you months if not years of time. But don’t ask them to help with anything else. Even good mentors rarely admit to not knowing something, not out of shame, but simply because they want to help. So it’s up to you to figure what your surgeon mentor’s one thing is. In the US, surgical mentorship seems to be an East Coast skill. Boston and New York are full of sharpies who are world-class at one thing.

Sounding board mentors are very different. They’re the proverbial “good listeners” who ask just enough questions to let you come to your own conclusion. In the TechStars community I’ve found that all the good sounding boards are from the Midwest. Some of them are so good that they don’t even need to ask questions. They’ll just raise an eyebrow or feign incomprehension at just the right time to force you to take the next necessary mental step.

It would be neat to say that the shrink mentors were all from the West Coast, but they aren’t. It turns out there are plenty on the East Coast as well. A shrink mentor is someone who understands the challenges you’re facing, commiserates, and then gives you the confidence to move forward. At times these mentors can be life savers. But don’t look for them in the Midwest. That’s one part of the country where asking for help is fine, but emoting isn’t well reg \arded.

The killer mentors, the ones who hold you at the bottom of the pool, are the blowhards. They give you advice with so much confidence that it’s hard to believe they could be wrong. Sometimes they’re not of course. Sometimes they’re right by pure chance. A stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. Recognizing blowhard mentors is critical. Avoid them at all cost.

I’m sure there are other types of mentors as well, but as I said, I’m new to this. If I discover any more, I’ll report back.