Real Mentors Tell You This
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About the Book
Professional employees are now routinely encouraged to have mentors and many firms have formal ‘match-up’ programs to enable these relationships. However, finding an accomplished mentor who has the time to be fully committed to someone else’s success can be difficult, and successful, high-powered mentors may limit their protégé list to those who are already deemed ‘high potential’ employees. But what about everyone else? How does the not-yet-recognized-as-a ‘high potential’ employee earn that valuable status and everything that comes with it? In "Real Mentors Tell You This", author Regina Darmoni reveals the lessons every working professional should learn, internalize and demonstrate in order to advance their careers. As the book’s messages are derived from the lessons the author learned from her own successful mentors, the text is also useful as a primer for those who want to mentor, but are uncertain about what might be expected of them.
Beyond advising on mundane topics such as whether to take job A over job B, a good mentor should be a terrific complement to one´s manager and must be capable of having frank and direct conversations with protégés. These on-going exchanges should stress planning for success, execution, inspection, articulation, the need to net, presenting data, presenting oneself, self-examination and corrective action, ownership, leadership, consistency, and a ‘can do’ attitude. Engaged mentors tell their protégés how to anticipate and prepare for “obvious” questions, when to speak up and when to shut up, how to collaborate to win, about personal resiliency, gut checks, ego checks, derailment factors, and what to do when you’re in trouble.
If you are not having these kinds of talks with your mentors, then you are not being actively mentored, and if you are not being actively mentored, you should know, real mentors tell you this . . .
About the Author
Regina Darmoni is a member of the executive team at IBM Corporation. Since starting as a ‘junior engineer’, Regina has held engineering, business, and management assignments in her 25-year career at IBM, including spearheading the launch of a start-up business. Regina holds a B.S from Michigan State University and an M.S from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an active mentor and continues to be very generously mentored herself. Having spent over a decade in the martial arts, Regina is an active, high-energy, disciplined person. She lives in Vermont with two teenage, active, high-energy, undisciplined boys and one amazingly similar poodle.