Most of what you learn at work will come from people who are not your manager

The reporting line is a narrow channel

The formal assumption is that your manager develops you. They have some responsibility for it, they usually want to, and they are also managing several people while doing their own work, so the realistic allocation is a fraction of an hour a week of genuine attention to your growth. They may also be from a different discipline, or better at organisational navigation than at the craft, or simply out of date in the specifics.

None of that makes them a bad manager. It makes the reporting line an insufficient channel for learning, which is a structural fact rather than a complaint. If you rely on it exclusively you will learn at whatever rate one busy person can supply, and you will learn one person’s way of doing things without ever seeing an alternative.

Where the useful teaching actually comes from

The most valuable source, early on, is usually a colleague one or two steps ahead of you. They remember the confusion you’re in, their knowledge is current, and the cost of asking them is low. Someone fifteen years ahead is often less useful for the immediate problem, because their expertise has become intuitive and they can no longer break it into steps.

The second source is the person nobody thinks to learn from, because their role is adjacent rather than senior. Whoever handles the operational side of what you produce knows exactly how it fails in reality. Someone in a customer-facing role knows what people actually complain about. A colleague in finance or legal can explain, in twenty minutes, a constraint you have been working around for months without understanding. These conversations are cheap, they are almost always welcomed, and they produce knowledge that’s not available anywhere in your own team.

The third is watching rather than asking. A great deal of professional skill is procedural and never gets articulated: how somebody handles a hostile question, structures a document, chairs a difficult conversation, or decides that something is good enough. You learn it by being in the room, which is a strong argument for asking to sit in on things that aren’t yours.

Asking well, and why formal mentoring often disappoints

Programmes that pair people up and schedule a monthly hour frequently produce polite conversations with no content. The reason is that the relationship was created before there was anything to discuss, so both parties arrive looking for a topic. The versions that work start from a specific problem: someone asks for help with an actual thing, it goes well, and the relationship grows out of the exchange.

So the request that succeeds is narrow. Not whether they would mentor you, which asks for an open commitment, but whether they would spend twenty minutes looking at a particular piece of work or explaining how a decision was made. Almost nobody refuses that. Follow it with a short note saying what you did with the advice, which is rarer than it should be and is the main thing that makes someone willing to be asked again.

What to do with conflicting advice

Learning from several people guarantees contradictions, and beginners often find this destabilising. The contradictions are informative. When two experienced colleagues disagree about how something should be done, you have located a genuine trade-off rather than a rule, and asking each of them what the other is optimising for is one of the fastest ways to acquire real judgement.

It also inoculates you against the more common problem, which is absorbing one person’s idiosyncrasies as though they were the profession. Every experienced practitioner has habits formed by the particular situations they happened to encounter, and some of those habits are wrong outside the context that produced them. You can only see that by having more than one source.

The part that is genuinely difficult

This is easier to describe than to do, and it is harder for some people than others. Asking for help requires exposing that you do not know something, in front of someone whose opinion you care about, and in an insecure workplace that has a real cost. Remote work makes it harder again, because there is no ambient way to ask and every request becomes a scheduled event.

It is also worth conceding that not every organisation has anyone worth learning from in the relevant area, and telling yourself otherwise wastes time. If you have been somewhere two years and cannot name a person who has made you better at your work, that is a serious fact about the place, not a personal failing. The partial substitutes — professional communities, external courses, open work you can study — are real but slower, and at some point the absence of anyone to learn from becomes a reason to move rather than a problem to solve where you are.