To the leaders who think they are good mentors
Are you developing the individual or just dishing out damaging advice?
I usually write about other people's leadership. But an old story of my own came to mind of when I was developing and the leaders who thought they knew how I should do it.
I would have been 25 at the time. I’d been managing supermarkets for Waitrose having been on the organisation’s graduate programme. I had done an average job. While I was able to understand and articulate the concepts about leading a team and trading, I wasn’t great at delivering it. A bit to do with inexperience (I’d only been at it for a couple of years whereas those who rose through the ranks had honed their skills), a bit to do with unconscious incompetence, but I realise now a significant factor; I was being given poor advice.
I take responsibility but I’ve also analysed why
Look - I was the person to took the advice so that’s on me. I take full ownership but it’s helpful to analyse what really went on. And, when you’re impressionable and seeking guidance, you assume that the person assigned to deliver direction understands you and has your interests at heart. But, in my experience, that is often not the case.
The most concerning part of the “mentorship” I received was how absolute it was.
“You need to do it this way”
“This is how I handle situations like that. This is what you should do.”
“I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Stand them in front of the problem and tell them”.
In food retail, business is faced paced. And, while it is just “putting beans on shelves” it can mean that the leadership of old was directive; no-time-to-waste. It was also very male dominated. Most leaders were men over the age of 40. “Grocers”. And, when someone new stepped in, their guidance was to do what they had done in the way they had done it. But…I was a woman in my mid-twenties. I did not have the experience, I didn’t fit the bill and I didn’t have the innate confidence.
The advice was built for someone who wasn’t me.
The people giving it had something I didn’t, and it wasn’t just experience. It was legitimacy. Decades of it. When a 40-plus-year-old man walked onto the shop floor and told someone what to do, there was an entire organisational history behind him. The team already knew who he was. They’d seen people like him make hard calls. They’d watched him earn his stripes. When he said just go in there and tell them, he was drawing on a kind of authority that had been quietly accumulated over years. He probably didn’t even notice it was given
I didn’t have that. I was 26. I was new. And I was in a world that had been built, led, and narrated by people who were nothing like me.
Here’s what nobody told me: mimicking a style that isn’t yours doesn’t just fail to work; it costs you. There’s an exhaustion that comes from performing a version of yourself that doesn’t fit. In a role I was still learning and being encouraged to adopt a style that I didn’t like. It has a negative impact on the people around me. No wonder I was doing an average job. I was managing three things at once: the business, the team, and a mask.
I don’t say this to let myself off the hook. I took the advice. I delivered the directions, probably harder than I should have, because I desperately wanted to get it right. But I also think there’s something worth saying. That mentorship that doesn’t take into account who the mentee is, isn’t really mentorship. It’s just instruction. And instruction can do damage, not because it’s malicious, but because it is naive and a bit lazy.
Building a new path
While this was going on, I’d worked out that I needed to sculpt a different career path. I knew the value of “zigging when other people zagged”. Doing things differently and uniquely could help set me apart. I didn’t want to follow the pack.
I now appreciate that one of my strengths is strategic foresight. This was 2011 and when it came to the topic of leadership, diversity and culture where being talked about everywhere as a bit future trend. Are you ready of the workplace of tomorrow? International. Intergenerational. Interracial. Working at one of the most white, British and middle aged companies in the UK, my assessment of the business was no. But also, my assessment of myself was no, I’m not ready for that. So I sought out a leader who took a punt and sponsored me to undertake a Master’s Degree in Intercultural Communication for Business.
It would take two years and it was a significant investment but I articulated all of the ways I could make it pay back to the business.
I was in the middle of the degree (studying alongside my full time job) when an opportunity arose to work in employee insight and oversee the 90,000 person engagement survey for the John Lewis Partnership. It was in an independent arm of the business which many viewed as an even fluffier, old-fashioned version of of HR.
I could see the value in this opportunity in a way that others around me couldn’t. The data, the scale, the understanding of how 90,000 people actually experienced the organisation. That felt important yet tucked away in a corner of the business that people dismissed. But I knew it would be enlightening and create a new route.
So when another manager, a little more senior to me and very ambitious with his own career, asked me for a coffee, I was already clear on my direction but was up for more insight.
“I’ve heard really good things about you, Nicola. That you’re a star of the future. I wondered if you would like a mentor?”
I’d been deliberately collecting mentors. Finding awesome people to soak up advice from. So the question wasn’t whether I wanted one. It was whether I wanted him. I told him my plan.
“Wow. That sounds like career suicide to me.”
I never went back for a second coffee.
Though it did came back to me that the person was listing me as someone he mentored. Telling people he was part of my development. He wasn’t. He had offered me one opinion (a wrong one) and then attached my name to his.
Mentoring isn’t about the mentor
This is one of the less examined problems with mentorship culture in organisations. It becomes a way of signalling influence, accumulating talent and building a personal brand on the back of someone else’s trajectory. When mentorship becomes about the mentor, their legacy, it stops being mentorship at all. It becomes performance. And the person on the receiving end usually knows, even if they can’t quite name it.
So what does good mentorship from a leader actually look like? And why does it matter so much to get it right?
It starts with curiosity. The instinct to advise is strong, particularly for experienced leaders. You’ve made the mistakes. You’ve found what works. It feels generous to share it. But the most important thing a mentor can do, before any advice is offered, is understand who they’re sitting across from. Not just their role or their ambitions, but their context. The particular combination of strengths, constraints, and circumstances that makes their situation theirs and not yours. Advice without that understanding isn’t mentorship. It’s self projection.
It also requires the mentor to ease off on their own experience. Handing blanket advice to someone else, especially someone younger, earlier in their career, or navigating a different set of dynamics, can be misleading. The 40-year-old man who told me to just go in there and assert myself was wrong to assume it would work the same way for a 25-year-old woman who hadn’t yet earned that kind of credibility.
And when mentorship goes wrong, when it’s directive or self-serving, people talk. Leaders who mentor badly tend to acquire a reputation that travels quietly ahead of them. The ones who give the same advice to everyone. The ones who claim credit for development they didn’t do. It’s a particular kind of arrogance and it erodes exactly the thing that makes mentorship valuable in the first place.
Asking for guidance is an act of trust
Mentorship is an act of trust. The person asking for guidance is making themselves vulnerable. They are showing you they’re uncertain, they’re stuck, they need help. That’s not a small thing. It deserves to be met with care, with genuine attention, and with the humility to know that your job is not to make them more like you, but to help them become more fully themselves.
Good mentors know the difference between this worked for me and this will work for you.
I know this because I have had PLENTY of great mentors and still do (you know who you are!)
And when a mentor gets that right, people don’t just remember the advice. The interaction and the feeling stays with them for the rest of their careers.