SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : PART ONE: GETTING AHEAD : A Mentor Can Light the Way Up : The Right Superior’s Help Often Pays Off, but Beware of Pitfalls

The job just wasn’t right for Prudence Baird. The billing department at a public relations firm? Forget it. She had a journalism degree, advertising experience, an 8,000-watt personality. Running down American Express bills that the bigwigs in the New York office had mistakenly charged to the Los Angeles office was paying her rent, but it wasn’t charging her up.

Then John Margaritas came into her life.

“John discovered me there in a matter of weeks,” she said, and she instantly claimed him as her mentor.

Margaritas was the new general manager of Burson-Marsteller’s Los Angeles office. Practicing his version of the pop management philosophy known as “managing by walking around,” he met Baird while trying to figure out how to cut costs in the office. She had a few ideas, and worked long hours on special projects.

“The next thing I knew,” she said, “he had given me a project to do on the side,” a conservation campaign for the Metropolitan Water District. “I succeeded at that, jettisoned over to the PR side, and life has only gotten more complicated since.”

Now a partner and executive vice president at Josh Baran & Associates in Venice, Baird remembers Margaritas as the hand that reached down from the corporate heavens and lifted her to Cloud 9.

Many successful executives can name a similar person in their past. They have learned that one secret to advancement and satisfaction is the enthusiastic pursuit of career advice from the right superior.

In some industries, it is true, such opportunities might be dwindling. As companies increasingly cut back, splinter and merge, older executives who find time to do more than look out for themselves will become rare, personnel authorities say.

Yet some willing counselors will remain, and experts believe that it is important for younger employees to find them.

Some large organizations, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., formalize this notion with so-called mentoring programs that pair older and younger employees, hoping to spark a fire by rubbing the right two sticks together.

But spontaneous combustion seems to make for relationships of greater intensity--as Margaritas and Baird discovered.

“I will spend time with anyone with enthusiasm to help them learn the business,” said Margaritas, now chairman and chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather Public Relations in New York. How does he find such people? Here’s a radical concept: He asks them.

“I believe that if you don’t find out what people want, you can’t give it to them,” he said. “And at the same time, I believe that if you know how to help people achieve their goals, you can benefit the company.”

The trust required in a mentor relationship takes a long time to develop--a factor that sabotages many corporate efforts to foster mentoring, according to Harry Bernhard, an associate dean of executive education at USC.

For insecure executives, especially, mentoring can be just a bureaucratic exercise: How can you coach someone about opportunity at the company when you don’t know where you stand yourself?

“It’s hard to mentor other people because it requires an intimacy, a kind of caring, that a lot of executives can’t muster because they are too busy,” Bernhard said. “Realistically, when the command of control is stretched thin and you are running from crisis to crisis, spending two hours talking to someone about their career is impossible.”

Even when a superior and a subordinate do click, dangers lie ahead. It is possible to become so involved with a mentor, Bernhard said, that when he folds, you fold. “It’s a better strategy to hitch your wagon to more than one star,” he said. And it is also dangerous to become “overmentored,” or unduly dependent on one boss. “If you cannot work outside the scope of that one particular mentor,” he said, “then you have been crippled.”

In its rawest form, mentoring allows bosses to clone and ultimately replace themselves, according to Harry Usher, managing director in Los Angeles for Russell Reynolds Associates, an international executive placement firm.

“Yet, with the breakup of various companies,” he said, “you see more difficulty in terms of trying to do succession planning in more coherent, organized fashion because, so often, the parts don’t remain with the whole.”

The strongest mentor relationships tend to outlast an individual’s association with one firm, however. Ogilvy’s Margaritas remembers that his former boss in General Electric’s public relations department, Al Tortorella, advised him to leave GE for a job with a specialized public relations firm. Tortorella also advised him to join Burson-Marsteller in Chicago, rather than at its headquarters in New York, Margaritas said, “because I would grow faster and be seen more quickly there.” From there he was promoted to the job in Los Angeles--where he became Baird’s mentor.

Bernhard, the USC dean, said his work as a marketing manager at IBM led him to believe that there are two good ways to develop people’s talents: Give them a hard job and help them to do it well. “Ninety percent of all development occurs from just doing the work, getting experience, but the other 10% comes from counseling,” he said. “Mentoring can have a catalytic effect, making that other 90% worth 150% more. It’s the yeast.”