In one of my ‘big tech’ roles my manager suggested I find a mentor within the company and said they’d recommend someone suitable. I was grateful for the idea.

The person my manager proposed had several things in common with me:

• Same career stage and experience

• Similar scope / level of responsibility

• Had been a founder

So far, so good.

However it turned out the mentor’s motivations were entirely different to mine. This meant that their perspectives were largely useless to me and I soon stopped engaging with them.

Now, with the benefit of more experience and self-awareness, I like to believe I’d have recognised the differences and made it work. I could probably have done a better job of explaining my motivations to the mentor… perhaps via some radical candour.

A mentor doesn’t have to think like you but to be valuable they do need to understand what you’re trying to achieve.