Coach + Counsel
Learning Lessons from Great Mentors
Who and What are we Talking About?
Many successful adults can identify important people who helped them along their journey. Beyond your parents or grandparents, there was a person—sometimes several people—who were not family, but who cared about you like family. They taught, supported, challenged, and guided you almost like they were family. They took a deep, extended interest in your personal development, often at a time when you needed them the most. Someone more experienced and wiser, who came to care about and support you to such an extent that we felt we just had to succeed, if for no other reason than not to let them down.
This is a substack about those people.
Why this, why now
The importance of this group of people occurred to me at a pivotal time in my own kids’ lives. Over the years, they had some great teachers, youth sports coaches, and other caring and supportive adults. I was often one of those people; I coached a lot of stuff, volunteered at the school, tried to teach them things at important moments. I was a key part of my kids’ development and was also a supportive figure to several other kids in our community.
And then, I wasn’t. As my kids entered adolescence, they would encounter more challenges at a time when they would naturally want more separation from their parents. They were, at least I hoped, primed to meet some of those people who would hopefully take that interest in them when they needed it most.
Beyond my own family, I also kept reading about a kind of crisis of disconnection among so many groups of people—young men, students in the post-Covid era, people in increasingly atomized workplaces.
Given these factors, I was genuinely curious about who had played this kind of important role of making connections and supporting people at key stages in my own life and in the lives of others. More importantly, I wanted to understand how they did it.
Who are these people?
The following posts will all be about this particular group of people; we call them mentors.
A mentor, in practical terms, is a person with at least a least a little more experience and knowledge who offers to support the development of another person with at least a little less experience and knowledge.
In the service of a larger project—a forthcoming book on mentors and mentoring—I would like to share with this group of people some of the stories and lessons I have learned from the past year. So far, I have been fortunate enough to have interesting and moving conversations with about 25 people, either with people who shared stories about the mentors who changed their lives, or with mentors themselves about their approach to mentoring. In a few lucky cases, I got to hear from both sides of the same relationship.
In all of the cases of people I interviewed, the mentorship did not come about as part of any formal program. These were natural, informal mentorships that formed inside some organizations, including schools, universities, or workplaces, though none of the mentors were formally trained or assigned to mentor any of their mentees. They just had a sincere interest in someone else’s personal and professional development—and often played this role for several people.
Who cares what I think about this?
There is plenty of published research out there on mentoring, conducted and written by scholars in the field. I have not written any of it. But there are two things I have done: Taken the skills learned as a researcher in education for the past 20 years and used those skills to gather information systematically from real mentors and mentees.
Second, I have taken some of that published research and synthesized it to try and make it as practical and user-friendly as I can, taking some succinct lessons from what already out there.
The result, I hope, is something practical that mentors and mentees can use to prepare themselves to have the greatest possible impact.
I will share a story from the forthcoming book each week, leading up to an announcement about where and how to find more information about my work.
As a preview, here two thoughts I have learned from talking to and reading about mentors: First, mentors are most effective when they support both the complete development of their mentee, including a human connection and some kind of technical or career learning for their mentee. They engage in coaching as well as counseling, as Kathy Kram wrote.
Second, mentors often appear at a pivotal moment of change, struggle, or even crisis for the mentee, or what the sociologist Jack Mezirow called a “disorienting dilemma.” At moments like this, the mentee might be ready to be mentored in a way they might not at other times, even if they had encountered the same mentor.
I look forward to share more with you about how some great mentors coached and counseled mentees through some important periods in their