Elaine Welteroth on How to Find a Mentor

Elaine Welteroth is an award-winning journalist, New York Times–bestselling author, and television host.

Elaine began her career at Ebony and Glamour before making history at Teen Vogue as the publication's first Black Editor in Chief. After leaving women’s magazines, Elaine went on to other highly visible positions in television, including serving as a judge on Project Runway.

In less than fifteen years, Elaine Welteroth has stepped into more career roles and garnered more professional accolades than many people do in a lifetime. Elaine has credited several women with inspiring different aspects of her career, including magazine editor and writer Harriette Cole. To this day, Elaine cites Cole as a major mentor figure and the one who gave her the opportunity that kick-started her career.

A mentor is a person experienced in a particular field or business who shares the benefits of that experience with a mentee—typically, but not exclusively, a younger person just coming up. The role of a mentor is usually to help mentees set up an action plan to achieve specific career goals, though a mentor can provide guidance in other areas of a mentee’s life as well.

A prospective mentor may be a supervisor or a more experienced person. They may also be someone unrelated to the mentee’s employment who takes an interest in their career development.

Potential mentors may have a long-standing relationship with a mentee, or they may acquaint themselves with the mentee solely in the course of the mentoring relationship.

The common thread is the relationship itself: The right mentor acts as a guide and advisor who sticks with the mentee through a stage of their development process; the mentee soaks up the mentor’s wisdom and advice.

Elaine got her mentor, Harriette Cole, by being persistent. While in college in Sacramento, she created a fake magazine in the hopes of landing an internship with Cole. Elaine then followed up with Cole’s then-assistant, Nubia Murray, through repeated phone calls and email.

One day, she boldly asked Murray for Cole’s coffee order. “And I remember the assistant goes, ‘Why do you need her coffee order? Don’t you live in California?’ [Harriette lived] in New York,” Elaine says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s no big deal. I’m just gonna fly there and just drop off coffee … She’s like, ‘Please do not get on a plane and fly across the country and show up at this office … I promise you, I will find time on her schedule.’”

Her perseverance paid off, and Elaine got to speak to Cole on the phone, which led to more opportunities. “I got to connect with the person who ultimately changed the trajectory of my entire career,” she says.

There are several ways to find a mentor. Here are a few methods that Elaine recommends:

• Go digital. You can use social media to find digital mentors whose career paths you admire. “You can slide into the DMs,” she says. “You can be incessant in your pursuit of getting on someone’s radar, but whether or not they ever respond, know that there is so much value you can glean from curating your own set of digital mentors that you follow, that you study, and that you allow yourself to be inspired by.”
• Look outside of work. Even if you have a mentor in your boss, you should look for someone outside of work. “Have a set of mentors that are outside of your workplace, that don’t pay you, and that don’t have [the] power to fire you,” Elaine says. “Make sure that relationship that you’re building with your manager is distinct, in that you are … cultivating your skillset and getting feedback. And when you need to negotiate for a raise, they’re not your friend. They’re your boss.”
• Look to your peers. While you may think a mentor has to be older and more experienced than you, they don’t have to be. “The truth is, the best mentors can be peers,” Elaine says. “Peer-to-peer mentorship. People who are in the struggle with you, that are in the trenches with you, that are figuring out how to do what’s never been done right alongside you. There is a lot of value in authority figures who have been on this road before… But if you are trying to do that which has never been done before, how can you ask somebody to tell you how to do it?”

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