The majority of people agree that having one or more mentors is essential to progressing their career. There are hundreds of papers/articles that talk about all facets of mentoring so I won’t rehash much of that. What I’d like to talk about is how Millennial Leaders can leverage their propensity to use technology to form what I call Mentoring Un-Relationships: one-sided mentoring relationships where the mentee can learn from the mentor without any interaction, i.e. the mentor doesn’t even know the mentee exists. I should add that the suggestions here aren’t specific to millennials or leaders but I feel they are especially vital for those, like me, who straddle generations daily in their leadership positions. There are three parts to a successful Mentoring Un-Relationship: identifying the skill gap you have, the people who can help coach you on it, and the technology you use to facilitate the un-relationship.  I’ll use a specific personal example to illustrate the point.

One area I believe I need to develop further as a leader is the ability to speak to audiences and convey my message effectively. The scenarios I will need this set of skills will vary from internal meetings, executive updates, customer interactions, and others I haven’t anticipated. The objectives within those scenarios will also vary, from inspiring staff to dealing with a crisis to selling an idea, and more. Also, many of the people I interact with aren’t millennials so I need to be able to communicate in what often feels like another language. When I evaluate myself on this skill set I’d say I’m not bad but not great. I also know I tend to ramble so I need to fix that.

I work at a company with many great leaders. However even if I was to set up mentoring relationships with many of them I’d get maybe an hour per quarter with each person. That’s not enough for me to learn at a fast enough rate to hit my own aggressive development goals. This is why I’ve broadened my net to include others. Let me be more specific. Here is a list of mentors who I’ve identified as being able to help me improve in this space, and why:

• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. He talks about his company, his products, and his customers with an infectious, authentic enthusiasm. I want to be able to have similar mannerisms and use similar words when talking about something I’m passionate about.  He also has strong values and consistently refers back to them.
• Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM (full disclosure: I work at IBM at the time of writing). Ginni is famous for being able to talk about anything in a maximum of 3 subtopics. She has the ability to net things out to what is most important no matter how complex the topic.
• Barack Obama, former president of the United States. He is a great orator who I feel leaves people feeling inspired about whatever he’s talking about. I’d love to be able to evoke emotion like he does.

There are others but this is enough to get the point across. There’s an element of curation here since there are many people who I find very inspiring but did not make this list. An example is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who I think is an incredible leader/visionary but in my humble opinion is not at the level of the people I listed when it comes to conveying a message. As an aside and if you have a few hours to kill, go watch the famous video of Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, announcing the original iPhone in 2007 and then watch Thorsten Heins, former CEO of BlackBerry, announcing the launch of BlackBerry 10 in 2013. The difference in showmanship and ability to sell a vision between these two men is astounding.

When you have identified the skill you need help with and the curated list of people who can help, this is where technology comes in. I don’t go searching for content. I use combinations of social media, subscriptions, and Google Alerts to deliver the content from my mentors to me. On YouTube I subscribed to the White House’s official channel which had all of Barack Obama’s videos nicely organized in one spot and I’d get a summary email weekly. Working at IBM makes it pretty easy to be notified whenever Ginni Rometty has a video worth watching. I follow various people on LinkedIn. I have a Google Alert that sends me all videos with Tim Cook in them on a weekly basis; it takes seconds to setup even on a mobile device:

Other options include using RSS feeds, signing up to certain websites, following people or groups on Facebook/Twitter/etc., and more. Obviously these aren’t perfect since you often get other junk but it’s a good starting point and easier than intentionally making the time to go look for what you want.

To summarize, every good leader has traits they know they need to improve on. Millennial Leaders, in many cases, also have the challenge of leading people and working for people from other generations. Do not limit yourself from learning from only the people immediately around you. At the same time don’t be a victim of being too busy for mentoring by putting technology to work for you. I am personally very thankful to Tim, Ginni, Barack, and others for all the mentoring they have provided me with – even though they’ll never know!