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Erik: Where have mentors been most impactful in your career development?
Hammans: I think in all the transition points. You know, in moving from one place, one vertical,
one functional area to another. It’s that early stage where you’ve got six months
in which you know you’re kind of not helpless but you’re not valuable in the sense, you
know, compared to maybe your cost and you know if someone’s able to kind of set you
on a trajectory or at least help set you a trajectory, that’s so important from like
a fit standpoint, like ‘do I belong here?’ But also you build a tremendous amount of
confidence about being able to do work that you know does actually pay for your time and
your salary and as well, I think it’s the mentorship brings in all the complexities
– like you have someone who’s been in an environment for a while, they’ve soaked
in it. There’s a certain logic to the organization that comes through in their advice and so
it’s kind of how we pass on socio-cultural meaning in an organization and so, I think
you can either go step on all the land mines yourself or you kinda learn how something
works. Again, it’s a starting hypothesis. It’s not, I mean, they have bounded rationality
too. They’re still you know working with imperfect information but at least you have
a nice staring point but then it’s also the relationship that you create with that
person. You can sort of see yourself I guess through their eyes over time. You kind of
see how you’ve changed, how you’ve grown and so, it becomes you know an important kind
of milestone in your own evolution. So, I can go back and I can think about you know
people who’ve been tremendously valuable to me, through my career you know and they’re
rarely, you know, these informal relationships where someone’s kind of telling me how is
should it be. These are some of my best friends and it’s sort of a process of coming, you
know, making friends around some period in your life.