Finding (and Being) a Mentor in Business Analysis: Why Nobody Figures This Out Alone, and What to Do About It
DAY 4 | Being a Mentee Worth Investing In - What makes a mentor keep showing up, and what quietly makes them stop
Getting a mentor to say yes to one conversation is the easy part, once you have actually asked. Keeping that relationship alive and worthwhile for years is a completely different skill, and it is one almost nobody is taught explicitly.
I have mentored many people into this field now, and I have watched a predictable pattern in the relationships that quietly fade after a promising start. It is rarely a falling out or a bad conversation. It is simply that the mentee stopped closing the loop, and the relationship slowly ran out of the thing that made it worth continuing from the mentor's side.
A mentor's time is finite and given freely, usually without any formal obligation holding them to it. The single strongest thing that keeps someone showing up for another conversation is evidence that their input actually went somewhere, that advice given became advice used, tested, and reported back on. Without that evidence, a mentor is left wondering whether the time is actually landing, and that uncertainty, repeated enough times, is what quietly ends relationships that started well.
Three habits that make the difference
Come prepared with a specific question, not a general update. "How's it going?" gives a mentor almost nothing to work with. "I tried the framing you suggested for the deadline conversation and the stakeholder pushed back on the timeline instead of the scope, what would you have done differently?" gives them something real to engage with.
Follow through on what you agreed to try, even when it does not work perfectly. A mentor who suggests an approach and never hears whether it was attempted has no way to calibrate future advice, and eventually stops offering it as freely.
Close the loop afterwards, briefly, on what actually happened. This does not need to be elaborate. A short message a week or two later, saying what you tried and what came of it, does more to sustain a mentoring relationship than almost anything else on this list.
What this looks like in practice
CLOSING THE LOOP WELL You: Wanted to follow up on the deadline conversation we talked through last month. I used the framing you suggested, stating the fact first before the context, and it landed a lot better than I expected. The stakeholder actually thanked me for flagging it early. Really appreciated the steer; wanted you to know it helped. |
That message takes under a minute to send and does an enormous amount of quiet work. It tells the mentor their time mattered, gives them a real result to calibrate against, and makes the next ask for advice feel like a continuation of something working, rather than starting cold each time.
What quietly makes a mentor stop
Beyond the absence of follow-up, a few other patterns wear a mentoring relationship down faster than most people realise.
Asking the same question repeatedly without applying the answer given the first time.
Treating every conversation as a request for a decision to be made for you, rather than a sounding board for a decision you are working toward yourself.
And disappearing for months and then reappearing only when something has gone wrong, which teaches a mentor that the relationship is one-directional rather than a real exchange.
None of these is damning on their own, and every mentoring relationship has an off week. The pattern is what matters, and the good news is that awareness of the pattern is most of what it takes to avoid falling into it.
It is worth remembering that a good mentee gives something back too, even without realising it. Watching someone you have guided actually apply what you told them and grow into real capability is genuinely rewarding for the person on the other side of the conversation, and it is part of why mentoring endures as something experienced people keep choosing to do, unpaid, on top of an already full working life. Being the kind of mentee described above is not just a self-interested strategy. It is what makes the relationship worth continuing for both people in it.
What I notice in the people I keep mentoring for years
The analysts I have mentored the longest are not the ones who asked the most polished questions or came from the strongest backgrounds. They are the ones who did something with what they were given, then told me about it, whether it worked or not. That combination, effort plus visible follow-through, is such a small thing to offer and such a rare one in practice that it stands out immediately, and it is the entire reason some mentoring relationships last years while others quietly end after two conversations.
To place some balance, everything in this article describes being a good mentee, but the same discipline matters if you are the one further along, currently mentoring someone else. Following up on whether your own advice was tried, rather than assuming it landed, closes the loop from your side too, and it models exactly the behaviour worth asking for in return. The best mentoring relationships I have been part of, on either end, had both people treating the exchange as genuinely two-directional, not a service one person provides, and the other simply receives.
Go out and be successful.
Oluwatosin Ogunkoya · Flotog BA Insights ·
1:1 mentoring and coaching for BAs at every career stage · http://www.flotogbainsights.com/
TOMORROW
When You've Outgrown Informal Mentorship - The honest line between a helpful coffee chat and needing something more structured and consistent.
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