Toxic Mentoring

To successfully traverse the world of work, talent and knowledge just aren’t enough. You need people skills and an understanding of the unwritten cultural rules that govern every organization. So mentoring, the pairing of a new (or younger) employee with a more experienced person higher up the corporate ladder, has gained favor as a formal program at many companies. And even informally, it’s wise to seek out a mentor of your own.

Sounds like a win-win, right? The mentor gets the joy of helping others and even favor with his own boss, while the mentee gains institutional knowledge and helps to clear a career path, partially by meeting the right people and getting to know them.

The problem is, we’re talking about people, who don’t always get along and sometimes use work to sabotage each other. According to this BusinessWeek article, the mentor-protégé relationship can often be tainted by jealousy, incompatibility between master and student and even the mentee gunning for the mentor’s job.

This doesn’t mean mentorship programs aren’t valuable -- in fact, they have plenty of benefits. Check out Norma's take as well as Maya’s on people who have positively influenced their careers. It’s just that, like all forms of human interaction, there are chances for peril and disappointment, so proceed with caution.

For more on toxic networking, check out this article.

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