“Too many cooks in the kitchen” – heard of that phrase before? Same can go for having too many mentors in your life at a time. Stick with me here because I know most articles glamorize the more mentors, the better. While that is true and well we are a mentorship platform after all, having a range of different perspectives and guidance can help, but it can also hurt your career by having too many – especially at one time for one key area.
A mentor is an individual who can support, advise and guide you as well as share their experiences. But what happens when you have too many mentors and it becomes contradictory information overload? Yup, that’s a thing. This flood of information and experiences can swamp the mentee and blur the actions needed to be taken. You spend more time thinking, planning and trying to break down and collaborate with each mentor’s advice that you spend less time actually doing and following your gut. To make your mentorship really worthwhile you need to put that feedback into action rather than be absorbed by it.
Locelle’s CEO, Humaira Ahmed shares her personal story on her experience of having too many mentors.
I had just started Locelle and was hungry for knowledge filled with curiosity and passion to build the best company ever.
8 months into it, I started to look at fundraising for my startup. At that time, I had two mentors but unfortunately, none of them had raised venture capital for their companies but were very helpful in other areas of business.
So, naturally, I thought, I should reach out to folks who have experience raising capital or are investors themselves.
That is where I went incredibly wrong.
On the one hand, I had a group with limited knowledge and on the other hand, I had a group with no experience raising in Canada.
The advice I ended up getting was not only contradictory, but cost me our first fundraising round.
A few months after I felt I could no longer continue to try to raise capital as I was not being successful with it. I also learnt fundraising is a full time job and that meant time away from building up the product and growing the user-base.
I stopped raising and started to focus on aspects of the business I had control over and could actually grow without raising capital.
Here were Humaira’s biggest takeaways:
- Get advice from people who have actually been in your shoes before and done it successfully.
- Don’t get too many mentors at once for the same challenge or topic.
- Be intentional with mentors’ time. Have an agenda and be direct.
While I wasted a lot of my time, I learned an incredible deal and have not made the same mistake again.
So how can I help my career rather than hurt it? Find one or two mentors who align with your current career stage and goals, someone who has been there done that. Remember you are not stuck with a certain mentor forever. Using a third party to make a mentor and mentee match takes away the pressure of being paired with the wrong person, at the wrong time of your journey. Lastly, remember your own perspectives, goals and actions result in the final outcome.
Ready to find the right mentor for you? Visit our For Individuals page: