The One Person More Important Than Your Mentor

I’ve written about the importance of mentors and about how a portfolio approach can be useful as we advance throughout our careers.

However, I’ve noticed that there’s often a critical player missing in many people’s overall career-navigation portfolios: The career platypus.

Let me explain. In a professional setting, do you, without concern about repercussions to your career, feel comfortable enough with at least one person to:

In Silicon Valley and other tight-knit physical or virtual communities, relationships interweave and evolve, work and personal blend constantly, and the landscape is always intense. The freedom to ask those awkward questions with the comfort that they won’t come back to bite you can be a luxury. And the usual suspects don’t always cut it:

Mentors teach you, provide introductions, and often advocate for you. But for mentors, people need — or feel they need — to show their best, focused selves. If people are going to go to the mat for you, you need to reflect well on them.

Managers are similar to mentors, in that the best ones will guide you and advocate on your behalf. But you need to execute well, and can only express doubts or ambiguity to a point.

Career (or life) coaches are professionally trained to help you identify and reach your career goals, or to improve your leadership and management skills. But coaches often lack the functional or industry expertise you need for those critical analyses — and not everyone can afford coaches.

Friends can be terrific personal support. Some friends may have the professional expertise you’re seeking as well. But friends are inherently biased, which often undermines their credibility and/or advice. If they are work friends, awkward conflicts of interest can arise when the company’s requirements and yours diverge.

Online sites like blogs (ahem) and Quora can be fantastic resources, but are by their nature either not personalized or not anonymous, which can be unhelpful and even damaging.

Enter the career platypus. Like a rare egg-laying, duck-billed, web-footed mammal that shoots poison from its ankles (seriously, how amazing is that?!), a career platypus has the following unique combination of characteristics:

Finding Your Career Platypus

All kidding aside, a career platypus is your port in the proverbial storm, giving you a safe haven to be yourself when asking critical questions.

Sometimes people are lucky enough to find their platypus in a friend or partner, mentor, coach, or online. None of these categories are mutually exclusive. But other times, as said above, none of those people will fit the bill. If you can’t find a single person to fill the role, you can use a portfolio approach — but not by compromising on any of the characteristics of a career platypus. A portfolio approach in the career platypus context usually means that you can ask people different questions to piece together the answers you need.

If you identify a career platypus, here are some basic guidelines for approaching one and interacting with one “in the wild”:

Be a Platypus

The best way to know how to interact with a career platypus is to be one yourself when the opportunity presents itself. Personally, I’ve forged some strong, long-standing relationships through conversations in which I’ve had this role. And to all those who have served as my career platypus over the years, I am truly and deeply grateful.

This article originally appeared on Karen’s blog