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As an early career professional you are a digital native with high potential to add value. Especially to digital marketing initiatives lead by senior executives. Your digital skills are an asset you can offer in return for high quality mentoring advice. Start by viewing mentoring as a two-way street rewarding both mentors and mentees.
Most professionals in early stages of their career see mentoring as a one way process from mentor to mentee. Thereby missing the opportunity to share valuable experiences the other way too.. It is worthwhile to rethink if your mindset is set on such a relationship. You and your mentor can create greater values with a bidirectional model.
As a digital native you have significant value to add in how companies shape their digital agendas. Most digital immigrants struggle with understanding how to best use the new social and mobile tools. Not so much for how to use the tools but to secure they can lead efforts in establishing a digital agenda for their part of the business. Most successful social mobile programs involves younger team members taking on to mentor executives.
Good questions to ask you in the area of reversed mentoring set-up are:
- Which of my digital skills could be valuable for Executives in our company? – Worthwhile to think through before you reach out the first time.
- Does your company have a social media advocacy program that you can connect with? – This will make it easier since the cause and rationales will already be known.
- Around which topics would you structure your first 3-4 mentoring sessions? – For ideas look at the sessions in the black edition on this subject (See Black #5-10)
- How can I develop the relationships with my existing mentor/s to make it more fruitful for both? – You will learn a lot you can apply to any mentor mentee relationship in the process.
For additional insights into this area here are a few ideas
- Digital natives, dinosaurs and immigrants [BLOG] – by Bryony Cole
- Mentoring 101:What every leader needs to know [eBOOK] – by John Maxwell
- Power Mentoring: How successful mentor and their protégées get the most out of their relationship [eBOOK] – by Ellen Ensher and Susan Murphy
- The Mentee’s guide: Making mentoring work for you [eBOOK] – by Lois Zachary and Lory Fischler
- Developing 21st century critical thinkers [INFOGRAPHIC] – by Mentoring Minds
With these ideas I hope you will develop two-way mentoring relationships and take on to add value to the social mobile side of your business challenges.
Tweeter Linder 