A Good Deal: On Mentorship (and Menteeship)
February 10, 2020

     When I have my attorney hat on, I give a lot of advice.  That's part of the job, obviously –  to advise, to inform, to recommend, to counsel.  I also seek out a good deal of advice in my practice, mostly from Chuck, the attorney with more than forty years of experience with whom I share an office. 

     It's a good deal for both of us – although four-and-a-half years into our arrangement, the benefits are still quite lopsided in my favor.  Perhaps that will always be the case.  Perhaps that is in the nature of mentoring relationships, particularly mentoring relationships that occupy the more "apprenticeship" end of the mentoring spectrum.  Perhaps that is why Sheryl Sandberg spent a good deal of time discussing the etiquette of the mentee (or any would-be mentee) in her 2013 bestseller Lean In. 

     Perhaps.  Perhaps I will understand this better once I am spending more time on the mentor side of the mentor-mentee relationship.  I have been quite fortunate, as yesterday's list demonstrates, to spend a great deal of time on the mentee side.  The investment that each of those people has made in me is a tremendous gift – free to me, but not without cost.  And collectively?  I could easily make an argument that their collective investment in me accounts for at least half of any success I can claim today, perhaps even half or more of the person I am becoming.

  

     That's a good deal.  Or perhaps I still have work to do to make it so.