My role is broad. I’ve spanned over seven projects around the mainframe in the last four years, from enterprise integration, transaction processing, and acquisitions. This has required a growth mindset, bouncing between teams, executives, and context. The trend has followed me through my entire career – different roles and accounts in Consulting, different acquisitions in my technical lead role – a strength of mine being the breadth and variety of the projects I’m involved in.

This level of volatility in my career has meant that the people I surround myself with become incredibly important. Reminders like my long-term career strategy, settling my emotional volatility, and listening to help me problem solve issues that crop up. I vividly remember being in my early twenties and listening to an executive all hands making an off-handed comment about having mentors in and out of work to talk to, and I was confused. How does someone get a mentor outside of the company I’m employed by? Where do I find one?

This was reinforced by the book Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, which I’m aware is a controversial book, whereby she tells a story about a woman that repeatedly asks her for advice over a series of months, and then one day turned around and asked Sheryl how to find a mentor. Sheryl reminded her that mentoring isn’t always about a formal relationship between two people every month with strict boundaries, it can be asking for help and learning from each other over time.

Networking, to me, is a dirty word. Overused, underexplained, and setting younger people up with the daunting task of working out how to game the system. How can I meet as many people as possible? How can I collect as many people and mentors as possible? What does it even mean to have a network? 

When I first joined IBM, within a few months I became incredibly curious. In my lunch, I would scour the intranet for information – what companies did we work with? What jobs did people do? What sectors do we work with? I stumbled upon Richard, who at the time worked in media and television, we met over the phone as I was a keen apprentice he replied to my note quickly. I had no understanding for how senior he was, and we began talking about all sorts – what I spent my time doing, how I was enjoying working in IBM, and learning about IBM’s strategy at the time. Richard remained a mentor of mine throughout the next decade, until he retired a few years ago and we try to keep in touch when we can.

Another example is around 2 years later, my third role in IBM and I had a personal development plan review with my second line manager, I had a list of 15 people I wanted to speak to about areas of the business I was interested in, articles to read, books to read. I remember his quote “you’re overboiling the ocean here, Louisa, you could scale it down slightly,” and I scoffed, confused as to why he thought that was too many. I was ambitious, and not afraid to cast my net wide.

Mentoring isn’t built through structure, it’s built through repeated moments of curiosity and connection.

At the time, I was an apprentice and I had no idea how many doors that would open, and that what I was building was a personal brand and a network. I was building a rolodex of people to call when I needed help choosing my next role, deciding on how to approach a problem, understanding the business strategy. Although I never felt like I had enough. Looking back, I now believe that feeling was due to the hype around a network and nobody truly describing what it meant. 

To me, there is a difference between networking and mentoring. For example, I have mentors that have been by my side for over a decade, seeing me through management changes, house moves, marriage, and in turn, I help them navigate their own challenges, even if they are generally much senior than I am. I have also had mentors that come and go, I see them once in a blue moon when we work on a project together, it’s like working with an old friend, and then they go back to their day job. Some mentors which I meet monthly, quarterly, we text when there’s a problem or we want to get a coffee, or some mentors, I see in the corridor or when they get a coffee from the coffee shop near my office. It’s a flexible relationship and one that for me, has turned into genuine friendships.

Networking however, is the ability to meet people and build knowledge, understanding, or context.

For example, now I’ve been to GS UK for a while, I have a network within the conference. I know many speakers by sight or name, I build a friendship with those I see regularly, like the committee, and I seem to have an amazing capacity to meet one person, and for them to introduce me to twenty other people. Networking is about knowing how an organisation or group of people operate, having the interest to understand who is friends with who, how decisions are made, and often, networks aren’t always useful, they are people that you meet and maintain relationships with. It doesn’t mean that you would have every person in your network as a mentor, that would be crazy, but it means you have a group of people that you know and that provide you a range of opinions, thoughts, and perspectives.

Coming back to my original note, even though my role is broad, and my network has morphed and changed, my mentors have come and gone, I see it as a privilege to have spent time with those that have guided me in one way or another. I’ve been through a lot of loss from mentors leaving roles or companies, and I’ve found that relationships and friendships morph to fit the circumstances. A mentor that I would never text, we now send each other articles and exchange opinions regularly, however, others have drifted away.

I spend time and energy keeping those relationships that mean something, and often, I don’t want anything from them because that isn’t my main goal. Go into mentoring with curiosity, interest, and the desire to find out more. Don’t let the ‘we haven’t got a monthly calendar invite’ or ‘I don’t know when I’ll next see them’ stop you from having a crew around you to help when you’ve broken down.