Paying it Forward

I’ve learned through the years that very often the main difference between people who are extremely good at their jobs and those who are average is the quality of mentorship they’ve received. I was very fortunate to begin my career at Hearst magazines in London, where I worked with the most talented and exacting group of women, two of whom in particular, guided, advised and steered me every day of the five wonderful years I spent there. They sharpened my copy until it was razor tight, they refined my editing skills, and they taught me how to write whip-smart headlines.

In hindsight, I took this for granted, assuming everybody was fortunate enough to have such incredible teachers. They set the professional standard for everything I would do in my professional life in the decade and a half afterwards. Since leaving Hearst in 2005, I’ve worked for six other companies here in Ireland. Of those, two have provided me with the same quality of mentor; these talented, wise women – one older and the other a peer – took me under their wing, and helped me to develop my skills and my confidence further. I’m so grateful to each one of these women for the important contribution they made to my professional journey. I’m also thankful for a key lesson I learned from each one of them, which is to always surround yourself with the very best individuals, because you’re only as good as the people you work with. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible.

Michelle Obama describes “Becoming” as, “Never giving up on the idea that there is more growing to be done.” Regardless of what age we are, professional mentors are vital to help stimulate personal and professional growth, and I wonder how the current working-from-home culture will affect employees’ training opportunities and career development without any face-to-face mentoring. Given that over the past several years, “reverse mentoring” – the exchange of knowledge, skills and understanding between junior and senior members of staff – has become increasingly common, the impact could be twice as devastating. But there’s a bigger picture here that stretches beyond simply helping individual women to make their next career move with confidence. A lack of mentoring feeds directly into the gender gap that exists in almost all industries.

Women need role models – not celebrities – working, juggling, struggling, multi-tasking women who perform at a high level within their industries. Young women need to see what is possible, as well as the advantages and disadvantages that come with those possibilities.

Mentoring isn’t just about helping out with the mechanics of any given job, it’s about steering young women in the right direction on those less tangible aspects of being in the workforce, like navigating office politics and finding the confidence to ensure they’ll be heard. It’s also about being a trusted sounding board for new ideas, and providing a real-life picture of how to get from A to B – a mentor’s journey is of just as much value to the mentee as anything they might teach or advise.

According to a Harvard Business School study, every professional over 40 questioned could name a mentor, but only a few younger interviewees could. Is mentoring going out of fashion? I hope not but if so, perhaps it’s time employees reimagined how they find their experienced guides by looking independently and outside of their immediate workplace? Given the current remote-working culture, which might easily extend beyond the pandemic, this could work brilliantly from the dual perspective of professional enrichment and much-needed face-to-face connections, which are sorely missed by many in this new normal.

Not long ago, Irish author and journalist Sophie White gave a shout out to young professionals on Instagram, asking that they contact her if they’d like to meet for a coffee to get advice on being a writer. Maybe as women who’ve reached a certain point in our careers, we have a responsibility to take that first step by offering ourselves up as mentors? Sophie told me that she got an incredible response to her offer, with more than 100 direct messages. So far, she’s had chats with three women and two men. Reaching out is a difficult thing to do, though, because our inner critic immediately laughs cruelly at our arrogance, our presumption, our delusion. But we have so much to offer as women in midlife who have navigated careers in an era dogged by recession and instability.

In my last job, I mentored two extremely talented 20-somethings. We often hear the phrase “paying it forward”, ie, passing on the knowledge that was passed on to you, and this was the first time I felt I really had an opportunity to do so. It was wonderful, although this was in large part because these two young women were quite special; one now works for British Vogue and the other for Harper’s Bazaar UK. It seems to me that we’re not as well set up for mentoring in Ireland as we should be. I imagine in big corporations, there are HR departments which ensure mentorship programmes are available and availed of, but certainly in smaller companies, there’s a slightly slap dash, half-hearted approach to it.

I mentored because these two women were eager to learn and I was keen to see them reach their potential. Nobody asked me to or monitored the process. I was an accidental mentor, you might say, prompted by the mutual enthusiasm for learning and teaching that existed between us, and probably similar personalities. In contrast, when I offered advice to a young writer while at another company several years ago (at the request of my manager), she was less than interested as she simply didn’t feel she needed any help.

It can be difficult for young women to comprehend the benefits of having a mentor, because “they don’t know what they don’t know”, as a former colleague once said to me. So maybe we need to begin earlier? Charly Young, director and co-founder of The Girls Network, a mentoring organisation for young girls in the UK, told The Guardian that “...it is personal relationships and deeper conversations that really make an impact. Sitting in [on a] meeting with a girl and her mentor from a large city firm, it was clear to see that as the girl began to relate to her mentor’s experiences she also began to ask more questions and grow in confidence about what she might be able to do in the future.”

Establishing some sort of in-school mentoring system in association with organisations across different industries sounds like a terrific idea, as it would normalise the process, so that when young women join the workforce (and it’s likely more would if they had professional role models from a young age), they understand the value of establishing a one-on-one relationship with someone whose successes, and failures, they can learn from.

I think even more than traditional high achievers, what we need are women who have not followed conventional career paths, but have succeeded in spite of this. A friend of mine earns a six-figure salary but failed her leaving cert. After a couple of dead-end jobs, she studied to be an accountant at night, while working during the day, and sat her final exams while heavily pregnant. I’ve always thought she would be an incredible inspiration to young girls who are disillusioned with school, or who, for whatever reason, aren’t “rated” by their teachers.

Mentors come in a variety of different guises, and as women in midlife we need to remember this when the devil on our shoulder begins telling us we’re not good enough. We have stories to tell, experiences to share and advice that’s worth passing on. And judging from the reaction to Sophie White’s shout out, there’s a multitude of young professionals eager to benefit from it.

Read more of Marie’s articles on life and style…
Do We Still Have Fashion , Silence no More and Difficult Women

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