You Don’t Need a Mentor. You Need a Job Group Chat.
Traditional mentors aren’t gone. They’re just hard to find.
When I need to gut-check a work call or find peace when career drama has me awake at 3 a.m., my go-to source of wisdom isn’t a wise elder who has “been there, done that.” I instead turn to a much more relatable, easily accessible set of sages: the three group chats I have with other working women my own age.
This might seem unconventional—even 10 years ago, when I was first starting out in my career, the accepted advice was to find a mentor decades older who could show me the path they trod to success. Some might even call it foolhardy—I can already hear someone rolling their eyes and making a joke about “the blind leading the blind.” But chatting with my peers has shown me how to make my own way with a more clear-eyed, forward-thinking approach than that conventional career advice ever offered.
Research actually shows that people learn just as much from a horizontal mentoring network—that is, turning to their peers and friends for career advice—and creative workers and people from marginalized backgrounds could stand to advance even more as a result.
We can find valuable mentors in much more accessible places: in a lively Slack channel, over the cubicle wall, or side by side on a work project. Shelbi Jones, a marketing manager living in New York, said that the work connections that have helped her the most have been those lower down on the company hierarchy.
“I was always looking at the most accomplished, most interesting people in the org and thinking, ‘I want to align myself with them,’ ” she said. “But time after time again, the people who helped me and helped me get my next job were my peers. When I started my career, I thought, ‘I want a mentor to help me navigate it.’ But it was my peers who did that.”
Those top-down mentoring structures, called “vertical mentoring,” aren’t without value, said Mia Keinanen, now a consultant for Russell Reynolds Associates. As a teenager, Keinanen came up in modern dance, where her peers in the company proved indispensable to her understanding of the dance world. Had she been studying Balanchine ballet, which has a much longer tradition, a more conventional mentor would have been helpful. But she and her friends were doing something newer and more radical—they had to rely on each other as they remade the rules for themselves.
She stays in touch with those dancers to this day, and even though the majority, including her, ultimately left dance to pursue other paths, Keinanen said the job insight they offer one another didn’t go away. She keeps a standing call with two of those peer mentors every week, and, in her mind, the result is a more diverse, interdisciplinary way of sharing wisdom.
“In 2024, you could argue all domains are interdisciplinary, or they should be,” she said. “You have different mentors representing different areas of knowledge, and you can combine those areas in your area to come up with something new and unique.”
In many industries today, the vertical mentoring structure those same well-meaning adults talked up to me a decade ago isn’t gone; it’s just hard to find, especially as so many of us are navigating changing fields or finding our places in ones that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. But it’s also hard to stomach—I have talked to so many people who say mentors they’ve met through company networks or alumni groups didn’t seem to have their best interests at heart. They just wanted to retain an employee for business reasons, or, more nefariously, to advance the mentor’s own goals at the company.
“In some jobs, it’s almost like people are collecting data to use against you,” Jones said. “There is a circle of trust that needs to be defined, and maybe it’s not said out loud, but you can feel it.”
Within her peer mentor groups, Jones said, she appreciated the approachability inherent to sending an email, shooting off a text, or messaging, “Can you FaceTime about a work thing?” With such an easy frequency, she said the connection she builds with these people feels deeper and, frankly, more fun.
“It’s a cadence,” she said. “Our touchpoints are just a lot more accessible.”
The peer mentoring relationships Jones treasures aren’t one-sided. Two people talking out a problem is beneficial to both parties, according to research. The person seeking advice feels heard and helped, but at the same time, the advice giver is able to build their own confidence, said Erin Mayhood, CEO of Mentor Collective, an online mentoring platform working with colleges and universities across the country.
“When you’re working with a mentee who has a specific problem, you yourself either remember a resource or a way you solved that problem, or you go looking for it—it increases their own competence and their ability to problem-solve,” Mayhood said. “We see it all the time. They really grow.”
When I’m texting with those other women who’ve come up in my industry alongside me, we’re usually crowdsourcing our various experiences to find a path that feels true to our own career aspirations. And just like Keinanen described, I’m going to each of these chats for different things. One group talks me through my writing goals, another through freelancer frustrations. When I want to understand a conflict from a manager’s perspective, I’ll reach out directly to two friends who’ve led teams. And yes, sometimes we’re sharing gallows-humor memes, griping about annoying co-workers, and venting fears to which none of us can see an end, but mostly, we’re reminding one another that we’re there with them, finding our own answers in a changing world.
That is the beautiful thing Keinanen said she’s seen in her own peer mentoring relationships: growth. When you come up at the same time as someone, you’re wedded to the journey. On that regular call she keeps with her two dance friends, Keinanen said the conversation can veer from family life to career troubles to technical questions, and every new topic feels of a piece with the greater commitment they’ve made as a trio.
“There’s a saying: ‘You’re not only on the same page. You’re on the same book with the person,’ ” she said. “And peer-to-peer, you can really get to that. You’re on all the pages: marriage, work, this, that, or the other.”
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