I Spent Years Looking for a Mentor
I spent years looking for one mentor. What changed me more was exposure to many different ways of leading.
I spent years looking for a mentor. Here is what I found
YouTubeThis article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
The person I expected to find
For a surprisingly long time, I thought I was missing a mentor.
I had heard the stories throughout my career. Someone successful would talk about the person who had taken them under their wing early on, challenged them, opened doors for them and helped shape the leader they eventually became. Sometimes they would describe that relationship as one of the most important reasons they had reached where they were.
I remember hearing those stories when I started working in audit and wondering when that person was going to appear for me.
I looked for them in senior people. I looked for them in partners. As my career moved on, I looked among people I worked with and people outside of work whose careers I respected. I was not consciously walking around asking everyone to become my mentor, but I had absorbed this idea that, somewhere along the way, I was supposed to find one person who would become particularly important to my development.
Occasionally I thought I had found them. Then circumstances would change, one of us would move on, or I would realise that what I admired about someone professionally did not necessarily mean I wanted to model the way they led.
For a while, I interpreted that as a gap in my career.
I don't anymore.
Learning through contrast
The thing that changed my view was not eventually finding the mentor I had been looking for. It was moving into an environment where my exposure to leadership became much less predictable.
My early career had been relatively structured. There was a hierarchy and, broadly speaking, a path through it. You became technically capable, then more technically capable, then increasingly senior. At some point, the person who knew the work exceptionally well often found themselves responsible for other people doing that work.
I have written before about the strange assumption organisations sometimes make that being excellent at something naturally prepares you to lead the people doing it. But there was another consequence of that environment that I understood only much later: you can develop quite a narrow picture of what leadership looks like.
When I eventually moved into a more fluid organisation, that changed quickly. Over the years that followed I worked for a surprisingly diverse collection of leaders, with very different personalities, backgrounds and ways of approaching work.
At the time, the constant change did not always feel like some wonderful leadership-development exercise. A new leader meant learning another communication style, another set of expectations and another way of making decisions. Sometimes the contrast between two leaders was significant enough that something which had worked perfectly well with one suddenly did not work at all with the next.
But eventually I started noticing what was happening to my own thinking.
There were leaders who made me reconsider how much autonomy I gave people. Others changed the way I thought about commercial decisions. Some were exceptionally good at creating space for debate. Some could walk into a complicated situation, simplify it and help everyone see what actually mattered.
There were also things I experienced that I knew I did not want to reproduce.
That was valuable too.
I started catching myself years later saying things like, “I remember working with someone who approached this completely differently,” or remembering how a particular leader had behaved when something went wrong. Sometimes I was borrowing something they had taught me directly. Sometimes it was simply an approach I had seen work. Occasionally the lesson came from seeing something handled badly and recognising the effect it had on the people around it.
None of those people, individually, became the mentor I had spent years expecting to find.
Collectively, though, they were probably giving me something more useful.
A different definition
That was the point where my definition of mentorship began to change.
I had been imagining mentorship as a relationship with one experienced person who could help me navigate my career. What I was actually benefiting from was exposure to different ways of thinking. I could compare them, disagree with them, borrow from them and gradually work out which parts fitted the kind of leader I wanted to become.
That distinction matters because I think there is a subtle risk in the way we sometimes talk about finding a mentor.
When you are early in your career, you do not necessarily know what you are looking for yet. If you become too focused on finding one person whose career or seniority looks impressive enough to justify the label, you can end up trying to learn from someone simply because you believe you are supposed to have a mentor.
I think I did some of that.
There were people I looked towards because, on paper, they seemed like exactly the kind of person I should learn from. What I had not yet developed was enough perspective to know which parts of their leadership actually mattered to me.
That perspective came from contrast.
It is difficult to know whether someone is unusually good at empowering people until you have experienced a leader who struggles to let go. It is difficult to appreciate calm decision-making until you have worked in an environment where every problem becomes urgent. You understand the value of directness differently after experiencing both the leader who avoids difficult conversations and the one who mistakes aggression for candour.
The range teaches you something that one philosophy cannot.
The mentor I would value now
That does not make mentorship less valuable. If anything, I think it makes the role of a genuinely good mentor more interesting.
The mentors I would value most now are probably not the people who would tell me how they solved every problem or encourage me to replicate the route they took. They are the people who would challenge my interpretation, tell me where their experience might not apply, introduce another perspective and sometimes leave me to work through the problem myself.
Perhaps that is because the people capable of being excellent mentors have usually accumulated that range themselves. Their judgement did not emerge from following one person. It developed through different managers, organisations, mistakes, opportunities, disagreements and experiences that gradually changed the way they saw things.
What I was searching for earlier in my career was certainty. Someone further ahead who could help me understand the right way to do this.
I am less convinced now that leadership develops that way.
My own approach is still changing. There are things I believed about leadership five years ago that I would challenge today, and I would be disappointed if that stops happening. I do not want my leadership style to become a collection of somebody else's answers that I adopted at a particular point in my career.
I would rather keep exposing it to different people and different ideas.
What I was really looking for
So when I think back to the years I spent wondering where my mentor was, I don't think the answer is that I never found one.
I think I was using too narrow a definition.
The people who shaped me did not all sit me down and explain how to lead. Some managed me. Some challenged me. Some trusted me. Some frustrated me. Some showed me approaches I wanted to adopt, and others helped me understand what I wanted to do differently.
It was the contrast between them that mattered.
And perhaps that is the part of mentorship we talk about less often. Finding someone who believes in you can be enormously powerful, but so can building enough breadth of experience that you are not dependent on any one person's version of what a good leader should be.
The question I would ask myself now is therefore slightly different from the one I asked at the beginning of my career.
Not “Who is going to be my mentor?”
But “Am I exposing myself to enough different perspectives to keep changing my mind?”
