None of Us Succeed On Our Own

Anyone, at any career stage, can benefit from a mentoring relationship. Being a mentor means providing a constructive, non-threatening environment to encourage someone who has asked for your advice or assistance. To find a mentor, you must be comfortable asking for help from someone with the experience, skills, and knowledge you want to develop in yourself. In my experience, the best mentoring relationships are those in which everyone listens with empathy, shares experiences, and encourages others to improve and develop. In my current organization (the University of Colorado Boulder), we have a formal mentoring model that pairs cohorts of faculty with at least two mentors. The cohorts and their respective mentors meet as a group approximately six times per year; at the end of the year, each cohort is paired with a new set of mentors.