Becoming the Mentor You Never Had
The Art of Stepping Up to Be the One-Up
Vol 1, Issue 22
Most days, Chakena Perry is the youngest professional in the room. When Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker appointed her a commissioner for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD), she became the youngest commissioner in that organization’s history. As an early-career professional, she has had to learn to be the leader for others that she has always wished for herself.
Chakena Perry
Despite the fact that the American workforce tends to be chock full of managers, they don’t seem to be accomplishing much. As Ed Zitron at the Atlantic notes, managers are “focused more on taking credit and placing blame rather than actually managing people.” My own research among uncommon early professionals suggests that the unamazing manager is all too common.
But if you’re like many early-to-mid-career professionals, you’ve come to the turn when you can’t gripe about managerial cluelessness, because—you are now a manager. How do you become the mentor and the leader you’ve always hankered for? Chakena’s story offers wisdom.
When she claims that mainstream institutions of our time are failing young people, she can cite her professional biography as evidence. Ever since high school, she’s aspired to be politically engaged. But she remembers feeling stunned by how little politicians were doing for their constituents. Understandably, people told her to stay away from civic life. “You’re too good for politics,” they’d say. But she committed herself to becoming the sort of politician her neighbors deserved.
One of her early gigs was political director for a campaign. Later, she became a staffer for a commissioner. It felt good to be engaged, but her candidate failed to provide needed mentorship. To make things more complicated, her boss didn’t have the moral intuitions that Chakena as a young professional was already cultivating.
Leaving that job was harder than it might sound. These days, in the era of the Great Resignation, or, perhaps more accurately, the Great Reshuffle, people think it’s no big deal to leave a position. Many, many people are saying, as Sarah Jaffe put it, why be loyal when your job’s never going to love you back? But for Chakena, leaving a staffer position required a lot of careful discernment. “I prayed about it, you know, every day,” she told me. She strongly felt it was the sort of position “that a lot of people will kick a door down for.” And she knew that once she quit the job, she would be living off her credit cards.
Fortunately, she soon found another staffing position, this time working for a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District commissioner. Out of the pan into the fire? Maybe. But there were bills to pay, and she still felt committed to government work.
Fast forward, Chakena had to learn to navigate another complex managerial style. Her boss this time sounded like a better mentor, asking questions like, What do you want to learn? But somehow, such excellent inquiry did not always translate into vital guidance.
Chakena consults with Governor Pritzker
And then, in the January of 2022, Chakena was appointed an MWRD commissioner. The job has given her the chance to become the leader she’s always wished for—basically building on what her previous bosses had done or not done. And what does that look like?
Here are a few distinctions Chakena’s made integral to her managerial style.
Timeliness Not Just Hurry. It would be tempting for someone like Chakena to be ceaselessly communicating with her constituents. People send her emails at 7 PM and expect to hear from her within 15 minutes. “Business hours don’t exist in politics,” she notes ruefully. But she’s learned to gauge her response time to the speed of real life. She’s a mom, a wife, and, at the time of our interview, a grad student (she’s recently graduated from the University of Chicago with an MA in Public Policy). She knows when she needs to pull back from what Cal Newport has called the “hyperactive hive mind” of digital communication.
The one exception? She responds quickly to young people. “I'm still 28, right? So, I know how it feels to reach out to someone that you look up to… Days pass, and you're, like, Did I say the wrong thing? Was my email too long?”
Listening Not Just Hearing. You’ve seen how accomplished Chakena is. Political operators don’t get to her place in life without having a lot of data at their fingertips and a lot of lived experience. In other words, she has a lot she could say. But what struck me during our interview was how steadily she comports herself. She doesn’t just nod her head like she’s hearing you. She meets your eye and listens. She hates it, she told me, when people are not listening to each other. Her line in meetings is, “Let’s start over. Let’s make sure. Let’s figure out where we’re missing each other.” Say it softly, as she puts it, say it less, and you’ll say more.
That can be hard, she concedes, when you’re talking to older male professionals. Chicago, after all, is nicknamed the Windy City because of its longwinded politicians. Sometimes, the best thing to do when things get windy is to table the business till listening’s more likely to happen.
Sharing life not just showtime. Chakena enjoys sharing the sunshine of simple human togetherness in the workplace. She laments that office life has become a scarcity during the pandemic. “I just want to say good morning to people and do birthday parties and stuff.” But if embodied presence is a scarcity, showboating sensibilities unfortunately are not. She told me a story about visiting stormwater management work in LaGrange and Burbank. Flood mitigation is serious business in south Chicago, so Chakena was glad to be onsite, even if another commissioner did most of the talking up front. When they got to the last stop, the other commissioner, perhaps feeling guilty about taking all the mic time, asked Chakena if she’d like to speak. Not really, she replied. No need. Chakena can talk about stormwater management with the best of them. But she doesn’t feel the urgency to fill the air just to hear herself talk.
These three distinctions take some practice, to be sure. But they can go a long way towards equipping you to be the early career mentor you never had.
Have you made the leap to becoming a manager? What have you learned—or, if you haven’t made that pivot, do you even want to? Tell me more! — Craig