Effective Mentorship

Or, why the best leaders don’t create followers

Aug 02, 2020

Happy Sunday!

Hope you’ve had a nice week.

It’s the time for your weekly dose of multidisciplinary reading to upgrade your thinking and decision making skills. If you’re enjoying Sunday Wisdom, share it with a friend! And if you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.

Q: What are the signs of a good mentor?

Whether you are an elder sibling, a parent, a teacher, a coach, a team lead, a CEO, a senior player, a politician, a social media personality, you are a mentor. But we are not taught how to be good mentors. We either end up showing how much we know and bask in our own glory, or we focus on making others our fans and followers (to bask in our own glory). That’s not okay! If others look up to you, it’s your moral obligation to help them.

I’m not a big fan of the word leader. It intrinsically implies that whoever you lead is a follower. Creating fans and followers by the minute has become the norm, but it’s not even remotely related to leadership.

I prefer the word mentor more than leader. Thereby you mentor an apprentice. Apprenticeship is about growth and maturation. The best mentors imprint their good qualities onto others thereby making them better versions of themselves.

It’s very likely that you yourself are a mentor. You may not be aware of it, but if you are a parent, you are a mentor to your kids. If you are an elder sibling, you are a mentor to your younger brothers and sisters. If you are a teacher or a coach, your sole job is mentorship. If you are a team lead, a CEO, a senior member of a team, mentorship is a crucial part of the job. If you are the founder of a club, a movement, or a study group, you are a mentor.

Unfortunately, none of us are trained to be mentors. In the name of mentorship we either (narcissistically) showoff our accomplishments, or get busy turning others into fans and followers. As much as we would love to impress others, mentorship is a lot more than that. Effective Mentorship is a lot like teaching. Like any good teacher, a mentor puts a lot of effort into making others succeed. This starts by building a strong bond with others.

Unless we have a good relationship with them, there can be no measurable difference between mentored apprentices and those without mentors. Rapport plays a strong role in mentorship. Rapport propels people to break from the formal roles and titles of boss and employee, teacher and student, senior and junior. Rapport helps people find common ground. Common ground is necessary to enable exchange of knowledge, dialogue, and ideas.

A startup is one such place where bosses and employees are (almost) equals. A startup is a fast-moving volatile environment, and if an employee doesn’t have the freedom to speak their mind, growth cannot happen. Similarly, if mentors don’t treat apprentices as equals, growth doesn’t happen.

Treating others as equals means not throwing away their ideas without giving enough thought. A good apprentice is hungry for exploration and experimentation. They are brimming with energy, and would often come up with off-the-wall and (seemingly) unrealistically ambitious ideas; and the mentors, in good faith, would often be tempted to ask them to think more realistically.

But as a mentor, we need to be a giver of energy, not a taker of it. Each time you hear a new idea, spend some time thinking about all the reasons why the idea is good before you criticise any aspect of it. It’s better to be an optimist than a cynic while hearing out ideas. Start with the assumption that the proposed idea is good. Play with it in your head. Think about all the possibilities it may provide. Ask questions, and have a discussion around it. Engage with genuine enthusiasm.

Pixar is known for their brilliantly crafted storytelling in their movies. But as Ed Catmull writes, none of the stories start off by being awesome from the very beginning. All of them suck, and the job of the team at Pixar is to take the stories “from suck to not-suck”. To achieve that, they have to be open to all sorts of ideas—no matter how unrealistic, impractical, absurd, or crazy they sound. This free flow of ideas is extremely important to get to a good idea that works. You just need one good idea, and they best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Good mentors are optimists. The people who are bringing new ideas to them are definitely optimistic about them. The capacity to not only be a natural recipient of ideas but also engage with other peoples’ optimism is what makes for an effective mentor.

This is not saying in any way not to be a healthy critic—it is absolutely essential in mentorship to be a critic. But there will be plenty of time and opportunity for that. Discussing high-level concepts while bouncing ideas is a good way to start off. Criticism comes later—while detailing out concepts.

Having said that, mentorship isn’t just about developing others’ skillsets and competencies. An effective mentor focuses on character development as well. They go beyond competency—shaping others’ values, thinking, personality, self-awareness, and empathy. In the long run, these attributes matter more than skill enhancement, and therefore effective mentors focus on all-round development in others.

Like a devoted primary-school maths teacher, who not only cares about their students’ grades but also their happiness, a devoted mentor not only focusses on improving others’ capabilities, but goes as far as to help them realise their true potential.

As much as a boss would want to retain their best people, the best mentors recognise that mentorship, in its most noble and powerful form, is a duty and service toward others. Hence they selflessly commit to the best interests of others. They don’t just seek to uncover others’ strengths, but also look for their underlying passions. Effective mentors help others find their calling.

At its highest level, mentorship is the practice of a form of leadership that is less about creating followers, and more about creating other leaders.

Little Bit of Wisdom

Think about your purpose. Think of what a successful outcome would look like. Where would you be physically, financially, reputationally? Brainstorm and ideate about the potential steps. Organise your ideas. Decide on the next actions. Now, are you clearer about where you want to go, and how to get there?

I Enjoyed Reading

You Really Don’t Need To Work So Much — “Recently, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon. It revealed a workplace where abrupt firings are common, grown men and women cry at their desks, and people are scolded for not responding to e-mails after midnight.”

Is it Worth The Trouble? — “In 1942 Albert Camus wrote a book called The Myth of Sisyphus. It is about the one truly important philosophical problem: Given the circumstances of our existence, shouldn’t we just kill ourselves?”

On Writing Well — “Writing fiction is about building a world, where the author is in complete control of its creation, characters and direction. Narrative non-fiction, the best of which reads like fiction, is more about the author consuming particular realities, analysing and rewriting them for the reader.”

What I Did Last Week

On a normal day, I have breakfast with my girlfriend while we talk about a lot of things. On a bad day, usually when we get up late, we have meetings during breakfast. Those days, we eat breakfast while attending meetings. The worst possible way to start a day! Last week we tried something else. During breakfast, instead of chitchatting, we decided to read to each other.

I loved it! She said she loved it too, and I believe her. I got the idea from Hugh Jackman. This is apparently something his wife and he does everyday—start the day on a positive and happy note. I loved the idea and decided to give it a try.

I chose fiction so that there’s a narrative we both can enjoy while having our morning tea. I picked Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. I start by reading aloud a page or two, and then she reads a page or two while I go on sipping my (almost cold) tea. Sometimes we pause for a while to discuss what we just read.

The author of the book grew up in a Bengali household. When he narrates his childhood there are a lot of things I can relate to. I had read the book back when I was in school. It’s a beautiful book, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t finish it. I still have the copy I had bought in 2004, so this time I decided to take this opportunity to finish it.

I Enjoyed Watching

Solo in India’s Biggest Slum | Dharavi — If I see a video of Mumbai I like, you are damn sure I’ll share it here. I love Arthur Chichester because he allows his audience to travel the world as it really is, not as part of a pre-arranged vacation package. The rawness of his videos could not be matched. “I had seen videos of the squalor and poverty to be found there but I wanted to go and see another side, I wanted to see if I could find some joy there, some happiness, some hope.”

Gladiator: The Tragedy of Commodus — This video looks at one of the most incredible an under appreciated movie villains. Also one of the most complex.

Are You Human? — “Have you ever wondered: Am I a human being? Ze Frank suggests a series of simple questions that will determine this. Please relax and follow the prompts.”

Worth Thinking About

Some people become so fixated upon life’s grey areas that they eventually succeed in convincing themselves that there is nothing but grey areas. A little realism is in order here. We must recognise that many things are, in fact, clearly and sharply defined, and not to see that is simply not to see clearly.

— D.Q. McInerny, Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking

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