What is a Mentor?

People in corporations often ask this question. Some, like me, were blessed with great teachers in their lives or someone who developed and promoted them and they, in turn, want to share that experience. As an employee and as a consultant I worked in companies that instituted corporate mentorship programs. In my experience, they didn’t work too well.

Why is that?

I think these programs didn’t work because there is something about the mentor/mentee relationship that involves mutual choice. The mentor must choose the mentee, perhaps because he or she sees a similarity with the mentor’s younger self or something in the mentee that indicates the mentor can help. Likewise, the mentee must choose the mentor; you can’t guide a stone wall or push a rope. Both mentor and mentee must want to work together for the relationship to succeed. Corporate mandates can’t take the place of choosing to learn and choosing to teach.

I was fortunate to have several mentors in my life. When I was about fourteen an art teacher, Paul Ciano, saw a kid who was struggling. I was having difficulty finding academic subjects that interested me. Socially, I had been first a little introverted, then a bullied kid. When I learned to fight back against the bullies, I somehow got into a self-perpetuating fight cycle. Like the reluctant gunslinger in dozens of Western movies, there was always someone else who wanted to fight me. I had too big a chip on my shoulder to ever walk away.

Paul Ciano took me under his wing. He let me sculpt after school, took me to my first Fellini movie and discussed it with me, and later cast me as Billy Bigelow in Carousel. I still sculpt some – mostly wood carving – and my undergraduate theatre degree helped me understand people in ways that made my work as a “change guy” much better. Most importantly, I stopped hanging out with a crowd that either went to jail or died young.

Mr. Ciano chose me and I didn’t think much about choosing him. In retrospect, he was very cool – a painter, opera singer, theatrical director. I didn’t see that then; I was just grateful for the attention.

Other mentors included David La Camera at Lordly & Dame, who gave me free rein at several startup departments; and Dick Connell at Harbridge House, who made me the “data secretary” (engagement manager) of my first three consulting projects. These were managers who somehow saw potential and dropped me in the deep end. They weren’t surprised when I not only treaded water, but swam passably well.

George H. Litwin.

Perhaps the greatest mentor I ever had was George H. Litwin. In the late 1960s, Dr. Litwin took the concept of leadership climate, just introduced by Kurt Lewin, and combined it with David McClelland’s personal motive needs work. George and Bob Stringer ran an experiment at the Harvard Business School in which they created three remarkably different organizational climates, one driven on power, one on affiliation, and one on achievement. In 1967, they published Motivation and Organization Climate that described the experiment and conclusions.

George worked with the founders of the Forum Corporation in 1971 to design many of that firm’s training and consulting offerings. I joined Forum in 1981 and met George a year later when he came to Pittsburgh to run a workshop for me at US Steel.

“Do you know what the largest company in the US was in 1882?” George asked the gathered steel executives. “The National Harness Company. Their chief product was buggy whips.”

Several executives stood up and yelled,

“WE ARE STEEL! NOT SOME DAMN BUGGY WHIPS!”

Pandemonium ensued. I think we were lucky to get out with our lives.

George had told me beforehand what he was going to do and I had pleaded with him not to go down this path. ”They are NOT ready for this message,” I counseled. This was, after all, US Steel, the US Steel that had been the largest company in the world in 1902 when Elbert Gary combined Andrew Carnegie’s mills with those of other steel titans, financed by J.P.Morgan.

In retrospect, George was right about the steel market. Mini-mills from companies like Chaparral and Nucor made steel out of scrap. Multi-supplier service centers, originally distributing big mill overproduction to smaller customers, became distributors for the mini-mills and cheap Korean and Japanese steel. Unbeknownst to these executives, mini-mills and service centers had already made enough inroads to begin the eclipse of the big fully integrated mills. And at the time of our workshop, US Steel executives had just learned that their 1982 market share of domestic steel consumption had dropped below 40%.

“We’ve always calculated steel consumption by taking the production of the Homestead Works and dividing it by .12 because Homestead has had 12 percent of the market forever. Apparently, it doesn’t anymore.”

In fairness, the Forum Corporation didn’t know that the steel industry had begun to decline either. The next year, my sales were in the toilet. What is clear now is that the steel industry as we knew it finally died in 1984 and all Forum clients in Pittsburgh- steel companies and the banks and heavy manufacturing firms that supported them – stopped buying training. I couldn’t sell anything in Pittsburgh so I began driving a 1,500-mile loop every week around Ohio and Kentucky to sell training. So while it’s clear now what caused this, then I was the salesman who turned a $1million territory into a $250,000 territory in one year. I lost my job.

Then George Litwin chose me. He offered me a job at his small consulting firm, HRI. Given my experience with him I was reluctant to choose him. What won me over was him saying: “You said they were NOT ready to hear that message and you were right. I should have listened.”

That year, HRI won the British Airways turnaround project. In fact, many of the signature consulting projects of my career – BA, Short Brothers, Interep, TD, Royal Bank, Citibank, General Motors – I worked on with George or because he recommended me.

I learned a great deal. But, man–oh-man, I was the world’s most difficult mentee. I didn’t listen, and thought I knew best. Several times he just let me fall into the bottomless pit I insisted on falling into. I learned much of what I learned from George the hard way – “Don’t just say ‘Yes,’ think about what’s already on your plate. Don’t compromise because you want to be nice. When you are selling a project go sit down with client and don’t just send the proposal. If someone says you should rethink an approach, don’t just reject it out of hand. Listen! They might know more than you do. In fact, they probably do know more than you.”

George didn’t pull punches, but was gentler with me than I sometimes saw him be with others.

I did some of my best work with him. And when he asked me to produce a video training exercise based upon his 1967 HBS experiment, I wrote the scripts and managed a team who produced what I still believe is one of the best pieces of training material I ever worked on.

When it came time to move on, I went to Gemini Consulting. I had intended to tell him I was leaving, but a mutual colleague saw an opportunity to gloat so told George before I had the chance. George was gracious. “I figured you would tell me eventually.”

I saw George at his eightieth birthday energetically dancing to a DJ until the wee hours. Seeing  him caused me to think about what a mentor is:

• A teacher, a guide, someone who promotes your interests and development
• Someone who chooses you
• Someone you choose
• Someone who gives you opportunities to perform and to learn
• Someone who lets you fail if failure will promote learning
• Someone who, when it is time to move on, graciously sends you on your way
• Someone whom you can never really pay back, but can only pay forward by mentoring others

Thank you, George, for choosing me, and for all that followed.