Category: For Mentees

“Personal brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.” 

– Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com

Personal brand is commonly overlooked as a component of professional growth. Most mentoring conversations center on how to conduct oneself in the presence of others: how to work a room, how to initiate a mentoring relationship, how to structure a development discussion, etc.

Bezos’ quote addresses the cumulative impact of these small interactions on your colleagues’ impressions of you. Personal brand is the persistent impression that lingers when you exit a meeting or come up in conversation. Ideally, your personal brand is a consistent theme that permeates all you do, yet makes you distinctive from your peers.

What do you want to be known as – a thought leader, an innovator, a coalition builder, an institutional expert? How do you want to be spoken about when you’re not around?

Your everyday actions and online presence should speak to this aspirational future self. Participating in social and professional clubs and activities can help shape your brand. LinkedIn and other social networking sites are also useful tools for ensuring that you sparkle from afar.

During my career, I have experienced mentoring from both ends of the spectrum: where I have been mentored and where I have done the mentoring.  I feel that I have also experienced a point in between those two: being a role model.

Harold as mentee                                                             At the beginning of my career, I was blessed to work for and with some exceptional people that were very knowledgeable and confident in what they did, so they never hesitated to share their knowledge.  I was instructed on troubleshooting methods and procedures and even given advice on career paths and personal matters.  Exceptional people continued to cross my path as I continued my career here at Argonne.  These mentors contributed to my character building and who I am today.

Harold as role model                                                                                                                   I remember some years back, my supervisor was reading a news article about a murder that took place in Chicago and he asked me, “Why do you stay in the city?” My response was, “My family, my friends, and my lifestyle revolve around the city and it’s my belief that some of the negative effects in the city are a result of people moving to the suburbs once they get to a position where they can have a positive influence on their communities.”  My decision to stay in the city has been very gratifying for me; I’ve taught Sunday School, I’ve coached little league baseball, biddy basketball, and supervised a weeklong Children’s Christian Summer Camp program in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for the last 17 years.

I have watched some of the young people turn into fine young men and women. What really touches my soul is when youth I have worked with share with me how much my involvement in their lives has had a positive effect on them.

Harold as mentor

It’s always been my desire to have a positive influence on youth – especially inner city youth – so I joined with some guys that I grew up with to participate in a program called “Black Men Caring and Sharing.”  We mentor 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th graders at the elementary school that we attended, Paul Revere.  Our goal is to give them some of the things they will need to be successful in life.  Students from Paul Revere have visited Argonne on three different occasions over the last five or six years.  This experience was good exposure for those students.

Working with the African American/Black Club has provided me with numerous opportunities to mentor by visiting high schools on Career Days to encourage the students to pursue curriculums in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics.

 Mentoring for me is a way to give back what has been shared with me.

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Harold E. Gaines is an Engineering Specialist in the Biosciences Division.  Mr. Gaines is an instrumentation engineer with expertise in troubleshooting equipment including centrifuges, water baths, stirrers, hot plates, and incubators. He has been dedicated to his work at the lab for over 39 years. Mr. Gaines is President of the African American/Black Club and has been an active member of the club since its inception.

If I look back, I’ve had many mentors but, generally, I didn’t think of them as such at the time.  One of the most useful mentoring pieces of advice I ever received came when I was 19 and wanting to join a hiking club at my college, which was in its second year of coeducation after almost two centuries of being an all-male institution.  A senior member watched me and volunteered the comment:

You are waiting to be invited and that won’t happen.  If you hear about something you’d like to do [a hike, an overnight, etc.], ask if you can go along. That’s what we do.

It was great advice – both for that club and many other situations.  I had been taught as a woman never to invite myself – that it was rude and it also opened you up to rejection.

Mentoring isn’t necessarily conversation. Some of the best mentoring comes when you simply go along with someone more experienced to an event or meeting. Having the opportunity to simply watch how people who are experienced behave in certain settings is very helpful. So I suggest asking if you can go along but be willing to accept “no” and not take it personally.

I have been put in formal mentoring situations where someone was assigned to mentor me and I had to meet with that person. I got something out of those situations largely because it gave me “permission” to ask questions about the organization that were “sensitive.”  The experience isn’t as rich but you will get out of it what you put into it.

I am glad to see Argonne promoting mentoring and hope that the conversation stimulates staff to think about how they can help each other and openly acknowledge we all need help.  Because, when you get down to it, mentoring is simply offering advice for the good of the person in a constructive fashion or modeling constructive behavior.

Finally, mentoring doesn’t have to be a senior to junior one-way street.  Junior staff often have skills – especially web/computer skills – that can benefit those who are trying to pick up skills they were never taught.

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Robin Lambert Graham is Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. Dr. Graham is a forest ecosystem ecologist with expertise in biomass resource availability for bioenergy and climate change. She is currently overseeing Argonne’s climate change and biological research for the Department of Energy. Dr. Graham is a member of the Lab Director’s Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Council and serves on the Council’s Mentoring Subcommittee.

If you stop developing in this rapidly growing scientific age, the field will grow without you.

Even if you’ve achieved your highest occupational goals, there is no ceiling to professional and personal growth. There is always a next level both in how you work and in how you interact with your co-workers.

You might think you’ve got everything figured out, but how will you stay new?

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(Post adapted from a February 2011 feature on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.)