To build a strong "personal board of directors," go beyond your immediate network. A powerful tactic is to ask your existing, trusted mentors to identify their own mentors and explain what makes them valuable. This provides a vetted, high-quality pipeline for expanding your circle of guidance.
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Successful individuals receive endless mentorship requests. Instead of helping everyone or no one, they should focus their limited time on 'multipliers'—people whose position or potential allows them to influence and develop many others. This strategy scales a leader's wisdom and impact.
Developing exceptional taste requires learning from the best. A tactical method is to ask one skilled person for the 10 peers they admire most. Then, ask those 10 people the same question. The patterns that emerge will reveal the true masters, whose work and thinking you can then study.
To build relationships with potential mentors or sponsors, replace the extractive ask of "Will you mentor me?" with the value-added offer of "How can I help you?". This non-transactional approach demonstrates your worth, builds genuine rapport, and makes influential people want to invest in your career.
Rather than seeking traditional mentors, Allspring CEO Kate Burke advises building a personal "board of directors." This is a curated, dynamic group of people from different areas of your life who provide diverse perspectives on challenges, with members rotating as your career and life evolve.
A manager is not a mentor. Instead of depending on a single, formal mentor within their reporting structure, aspiring leaders should cultivate a personal 'board' of two or three trusted advisors. This external network provides diverse, on-demand input for specific business situations that fall outside a leader's direct experience or comfort zone.
Personal growth accelerates via "transformational gravity." Individuals who are vastly more experienced in your desired field exert a stronger pull, helping you progress much faster than mentors who are only slightly ahead. The greater the gap, the stronger the magnetic pull towards your goal.
Mentoring's value increases when done outside your direct org. It becomes a two-way street: you learn about other parts of the business, and you can plant seeds of influence and better engineering practices that can grow and spread organically throughout the company.
Building influence requires a strategic approach. Actively survey your professional relationships, identify where you lack connections with stakeholders, and methodically invest time in building alliances with leaders who can advocate for your ideas when you're not in the room.
Instead of seeking feedback broadly, prioritize 'believability-weighted' input from a community of vetted experts. Knowing the track record, specific expertise, and conviction levels of those offering advice allows you to filter signal from noise and make more informed investment decisions.
Instead of generic networking, founder Janice Omadeke prepared for her accelerator by creating hyper-specific lists of target mentors. She cross-referenced sponsors and partners with HR leaders at "best places to work," enabling her to make targeted, intelligent asks and maximize every networking opportunity.
