Top 6 Mentoring Quotes by Well-known Authors, Famous People and Newsmakers to Inspire You

In her book ‘Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,’ Sheryl Sandberg talks about the mentor/mentee relationship – and how it needs to be organic. She goes on to explain how important it is for men and women to step into mentoring roles. I would argue that not only is it important – but it’s important far earlier than we think.

As more technology professionals devote more time to mentoring, they will sow the seeds of a future workforce capable of using Internet connections to change the world.

In what is known as the 70/20/10 learning concept, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo, in collaboration with Morgan McCall of the Center for Creative Leadership, explain that 70 percent of learning and development takes place from real-life and on-the-job experiences, tasks, and problem solving; 20 percent of the time development comes from other people through informal or formal feedback, mentoring, or coaching; and 10 percent of learning and development comes from formal training.

Listening sounds like a ridiculous characteristic for mentoring, but genuinely being invested and interested in people, meeting them for cups of coffee and spending time with people, and using the network I’ve been very lucky to build up to help others are all things I do to help others.

Rather than accepting the drifting separation of the generations, we might begin to define a more complex and interesting set of life stages and parenting passages, each emphasizing the connections to the generations ahead and behind. As I grow older, for example, I might first see my role as a parent in need of older, mentoring parents, and then become a mentoring parent myself. When I become a grandparent, I might expect to seek out older mentoring grandparents, and then later become a mentoring grandparent.

The recommendation when I’m mentoring folks, I always tell them – and we talked about this last year – take a risk.