Mentorship is an often-overlooked step to career success. ISACA Senior Director of Member Experience Liz Pisney, ISACA Board Director Veronica Rose and career coach Caitlin McGaw came together this month to celebrate International Mentoring Day (17 January) in a recent ISACA Live episode. The conversation featured the benefits of mentorship, personal stories of mentorship success and highlights from ISACA’s Mentorship Program, which has quickly gained traction after its official debut in 2022.
“Mentorship is not just for that moment, but for the long run, too,” Pisney emphasized. “And [it’s] not just about those technical skills, but those human skills, those more durable skills that we all need in our careers.”
Rose outlined several key aspects of successful mentorship for both the mentor and the mentee, like active listening, research, honesty, transparency, empathy and accountability. According to McGaw, creating and maintaining trust, following through with requests and tasks, and showing the other person that you paid attention and completed what they asked of you are some of the most important behaviors in successful mentor-mentee relationships. Gratitude and reciprocity are essential for these voluntary roles, and proactive mentees who check in about their assignments and who share the challenges they face encourage mentors’ desires to help them even more.
“Asking for help is not easy, so by the time someone comes out and says, ‘I need mentorship,’ they have really put aside their ego and their fears to come and get help,” says Rose.
It is crucial that both parties understand the rules and expectations they have for each other to benefit the most from their partnership. Mutually achieving goals and influencing each other cannot only affect decisions in one’s career but also in their life outside of work. The connections that form between mentors and mentees can last long after a specific mentorship period.
You can create your own personal “board of directors” as the “CEO of your career,” as McGaw termed it. Having a team of respected professionals—potentially including former bosses, professors or family members who are involved in the business world—can offer valuable perspectives on your growth over the course of time. At the same time, it is equally as beneficial to have mentors for specific skills or tasks that you are trying to master.
Rose shared that more than 1,000 mentors have signed up for ISACA’s Mentorship Program to date, as well as the following statistics: 83 percent of respondents to a 2021 survey about this program agreed that it supported their professional development, 96 percent felt like it strengthened them in their community and 81 percent felt like it added value to their ISACA membership. Rose said that the program’s focus on the mentee’s responsibilities differentiates it from other mentorship programs.
“The bottom line here is that successful people have mentors,” McGaw said. “They have worked to understand the how, what, where, why of mentoring, and how to build successful relationships.”
Editor’s note: For more information on how to achieve career success through mentorship, visit https://mentorship.isaca.org/.