In this instructive episode, Deborah Heiser, Founder and CEO of The Mentor Project, shares strategies for effective mentorship in organizations. If you struggle with leadership development or succession planning, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What lateral mentoring enhances cross-functional collaboration
– Why mentorship fosters generativity for stage 5 legacy
– How to implement hierarchical mentoring for team growth
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder and I’m your host, Scott ritheimer, and today, we’re going to cover a topic on the show that I actually can’t believe we’ve not covered before. Some of you more eagle eyed or eared viewers might be able to spot a time that we did, but I was going back through my notes and how notes and haven’t found one. And that shocked me, because this is something that I use with my clients very, very frequently, particularly those who want to develop their leaders faster, up and down the org chart, wherever it is and and what I tend to use this for a lot is helping folks to there’s lots of language for this, but deepen their in their tribal knowledge or their institutional knowledge, or to increase the ability for teams to work cross functionally and communicate better with each other, or to just help them build an organization that’s going to be here for a while and thrive for decades. So what is this thing? This magical elixir? There’s nothing magical about it. It’s mentoring. And for all you stage five CEOs out there, this could be, I actually think it is one of the most important strategic imperatives for your success, but you don’t want to hear me ramble on about it. And in fact, we’ve got an amazing guest with us here today is Dr Deborah Heiser, who is an applied developmental psychologist. She’s the CEO and founder of the mentor project and author of the mentorship edge. She’s a TEDx speaker, a member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 coaches, thinkers, 50 radar list, and an expert contributor to Psychology Today. She’s also an adjunct professor, and she’s here with us today. Deborah, welcome to the show. So excited to have you on. Been looking forward to this conversation. I really enjoyed the book, and my first question for you here, to just kind of get us all on the same page, is actually a why question, what inspired you to write the mentorship edge? Why’d you do it?
Deborah Heiser
Because I had been hearing so many people talk about mentorship in a way that was inaccurate, and the term has sort of been taken over so that people think that it has to be that you find a mentor. It’s really been defined in a way that’s like a coach. So people should be getting coaches right, but they should be having multiple mentors, and so people were really utilizing it incorrectly, implementing it incorrectly in companies, and just not utilizing in a way that we’re built to want to engage in, and that we do for free all the time. We just don’t realize it.
Scott Ritzheimer
There’s something that jumped out to me as I was reading through the book, is the your take on going and finding a mentor, and this kind of imperative, this drive that we have, why is finding a mentor not the right approach and what is the better way?
Deborah Heiser
So when people think I have to go find a mentor, they think that person is going to solve everything they have. Because, you know, if you say I’m going to go get a coach, there’s a goal with that. I want that coach to do something or other with me, so that if I’m in a sport, it’s that I get better at the sport, that I can win the game. If you’re hiring a coach for work, it is a work goal. Mentors aren’t there just to get you through something at work. It’s an emotional relationship that you’re having with that person. So that’s where we lose that if you have just one you’re gonna get help in one area. That’s it. And maybe you want growth and development that brings you across multiple disciplines, multiple areas in your company. Maybe it’s inside and outside of work. Maybe it is that you want to have a whole lateral fleet of people who have your back and who you have their back. It makes it so that you have a much bigger, much more fruitful work experience if you have multiple mentors.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and I want to talk about this idea of mentoring through two different lenses for our audience. The first one is, you know, who should have a mentor and why from a listener standpoint. But then I also want to look at, how can we use a culture of mentorship, or mentorship programs inside our business to scale more effectively? So let’s start with the first one. What are the what are reasons why someone should go out and start looking for mentors, maybe some of the symptoms that they might feel, or some of the best reasons you’ve seen for finding mentors.
Deborah Heiser
It’s the very smallest. Most people think I need to go find a mentor for some big umbrella thing. It’s the small things. I need to finish a project. I need to go get mentorship and how I market that I need to, you know, there’s going to be somebody that has that expertise. Maybe I want to get a point across, or make some kind of a statement or advocate for something. I would want to mentor for that. So pick something small, and when you do that, you start to build your group of people. So. So when we’re looking for mentors, we shouldn’t be looking for that one big person. We should be looking around and saying, What am I not good at? Now, for myself, personally, I go out and I say, I’m not good at a lot of stuff, like, I’m a terrible marketer, horrible. I need mentors in that I, you know, came out. I’m a psychologist, right? Does that make me a great business person? No, I better go get somebody who understands operations, I better get somebody who can help me with leadership. I better get somebody who can help me with all these different things. And mentors are available for that, and if it’s a very specific thing, you’re able to tap into somebody’s expertise and it doesn’t feel overwhelming to them. They don’t feel like you’re going to ask to be like in an arranged marriage with them for the rest of your life, you can get your goals satisfied and move on.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I like that for so many different reasons, but this idea of starting small, one is they don’t have to be. One of the things that we think a lot about mentors is that they have to be kind of further down the road than me in everything that I want to be good at. And it’s like, how many people meet that and how much time do they have to spend, right? And it’s like, plenty and plenty, but it’s a little more intimidating for both parties. But I love this idea of, like, starting small, and because there’s, there’s a lot of people who are better than you at a lot of things, and that’s great, great advice, especially for starting out. So, all right, we’ve, we’ve got an idea. There’s something in the back of everyone’s mind, and we’ve moved it to the front. They’re like, I want to get some help with this. The next question was, like, what does that look like? You know, is it, do I have to take them to a cup of coffee? Are we going to meet for the next 72 months? Like, what does, what does the actual process of mentorship look like?
Deborah Heiser
I’ll give you two examples, and they’re both people who did world changing work so and they’re both in the book. So Irene yakbus Is somebody who worked for NASA. She’s the one that pressed the Launch button on the mission to Mercury. She is a super amazing engineer. She moved jobs and went to IBM. Now she should, in everyone’s mind, have no problem walking in the door, but she was petrified, just like a sixth grader walking into lunch at the cafeteria in a new school. So she walked in and she was like, I don’t know the lay of the land. And there was somebody there who a couple of days in working there, that was giving a talk in front of a lot of the employees at IBM, and she said, hey, if anybody needs a mentor, I’m around. And so Irene called me, and she said, Oh my gosh, I’m too intimidated. I can’t call her and I can’t say I want to mentor. I was like, why? She just said she wanted to mentor people. Like, why wouldn’t you do that? And she said, I don’t know what to even ask her. And I said, Tell her you want to learn the lay of the land. You’re brand new here. So she emailed her, and the woman that was such an easy ask, can you tell me the lay of the land? Yeah, and that’s as simple as, where’s the bathroom? What do people do here at lunchtime? Tell me about the culture. And they ended up being mentor and mentee for about four years, and now they’re friends. So that small little thing then led to opening the door for a larger question, another and another that ended up helping. So that’s one way that you can do it. Start small. If you’re new somewhere, ask for the lay of the land. That is easy for somebody to say, I can check that box. Yeah. And Bill Cheswick was the father of the network firewall. So he was at Bell Labs, and his boss said, hey, I want you to accomplish this ridiculous task of, you know, creating a network firewall. Well, nobody can do something like that by themselves. So what he did was he wheelied himself in his office chair down the hall to Steve bellovin, who was a completely different department. This was not gonna help Steve bellovin at all to help bill, but he liked him. And he said, Sure, I’ll teach you what I know, and then let’s see if that can get incorporated into what you’re doing. It led to creating the firewall so you do not have to go to somebody above you, like Irene did. You could go to somebody lateral to you, ask a small question. Can you help me figure this out? That person can then say, Yeah, sure. And most do. Most people say yes, if they don’t. So you go to somebody else. But it’s not like somebody’s gonna Can you believe that person asked me for their my advice that never happens. So that’s really how it works, and that’s how you can do something that’s very small that turns into something very big.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. All right, so starting small, both in terms of what we want help with, and the ask to start there, is fantastic. I want to shift gears a little bit to what this looks like organizationally, because there’s just a ton of content on that in the book. And again, highly recommend the book for anyone who’s interested in this. But what I wanted to the question that I had for you is mentoring changes over time. At least I’ve seen you when you’re there at the ground level, there. Five people on your team, like mentoring happens shoulder to shoulder. You might not necessarily call it that, but it’s happening. Yeah. And what I’ve found is founders actually develop a decent instinct at that when they’re shoulder to shoulder, but they lose that when they make it to the CEO stage, because they’re not there shoulder to shoulder with Yes, right? Even their executive team. They might be all over the place at any given point in time, and so in you can’t possibly be shoulder to shoulder with 500 employees. So what? How does this change? What does mentoring look like in a scalable framework for an organization?
Deborah Heiser
So there’s a good example of how that can look. It does work well in a lot of organizations, and it works terribly in others. So some organizations really do understand the value of mentorship. And people volunteer to go in and say, I’d like to mentor. It’s a way of connecting. And Colgate Palmolive, their research division, does it really well. So they have a women’s network that is just there for people to get together, and because it’s research, they were trying to empower women in a mostly male dominated, you know, area, they have coaches. So they don’t say, Go get a coach and that will be your mentor too, because coaches aren’t mentors. They’re coaches. And then they they really encourage people to get mentors, not just one. And the idea is that it doesn’t matter how high up you are. Imagine you’re the CEO and you’re trying to sell a widget, and you want to and you’re a Gen Xer and you want to sell it to, you know, Gen Z, you better understand that culture, and you’re going to need to get mentored by somebody who’s Gen Z most likely to understand that so you can sell your widgets. So people often don’t think, Oh, this is going to work. And Jack Welch was the first person to really say reverse mentoring is something that’s important. It’s really just hierarchical mentoring in the opposite direction. But that’s happening all the time, places and organizations that realize that hierarchy is not in one direction, that it’s just a path, that that’s all it is, is one, that they will have people going in both directions. So somebody at the top will be utilizing mentorship from somebody you know at a lower level. And it’s not just to learn tech, it’s to learn culture, values and other things that not don’t just help to sell widgets, but will help to understand people coming into the companies. Because, as everybody knows, every generation, boomers will like, oh, Gen X. They’re the laziest generation. Gen X comes along and they’re like, oh, millennials are terrible. It’s because they don’t understand the culture or the values of the other generations, and so good companies will come in, and it removes that issue that CEOs often have, and it helps them to be better leaders. Yeah,
Scott Ritzheimer
I really like has so much to unpack in there, but one of the things that I liked was you gave a lot of the directionality of possible mentoring relationships, and you’ve referenced a couple of them here, so if you could just kind of give us an introduction to that, what are some of the different places inside of an organization or relationships or styles that you can look for with mentors?
Deborah Heiser
So I encourage everyone to look to their left and look to their right. You’re looking at your next best mentor or or mentee, someone that you can mentor. And an example of this, this is called lateral mentoring, and it’s the most impactful form of mentoring. Most of us think we just need to be pulled up by somebody. No, here’s the real way that it works, really, really well. Some people do it intuitively, without a problem, and others struggle with it, because they think if I don’t get somebody above me, I’ll never move up. Lateral is just a waste of my time. But here’s how it really works. Anytime you’re doing a startup, if you’re an entrepreneur, this is intuitive to most people, yeah, and that is that if I’m a software engineer, I better turn to my left and look at a hardware engineer. I’m not going to be able to make anything without that. That’s Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak, if you look at, you know, any of the big things that have ever happened, that’s where, you know, you see the lateral mentorship within companies and organizations. It’s where you have a safety you feel like you can be vulnerable around somebody who doesn’t have your promotion or your, you know, reviews in front of them. So I might be able to easily say to somebody, Gee, I don’t know what I’m doing with this. Can you help me easy? This happens in law, medicine, corporate areas, everything. An example that I had from a person who’s a judge, a federal judge, if you’re a judge, you cannot say, I don’t know how to do the case. So what do you do? You can’t go up, and you’re not going to go down to somebody else below you. You have to turn left or right to lateral mentoring. And federal judges in Iowa started a lunch program so that they could turn you know, you can’t go. Hey, Jim, I have no idea what I’m doing, and I have this case coming up. You can go at a lunch though, and say, Hey Jim, you you had a case like this. Can you tell me how that worked? What did you do for that you were able to express something that doesn’t make you look like you’re incompetent. And we can do that in any field medicine, it happens all the time. And curbside consults, it happens in Grand Rounds in corporations. That happens. And an example is for LaTanya Kilpatrick, she went to a conference, and she was having a huge issue at Colgate where they couldn’t solve a problem in oral health. So she went to a conference, and happened to be chatting with somebody who worked with dog food. Well, she turned to that person later and said, I know you’re working in gut biomes with dog food. Is there any relation at all that could be translated to human beings? Her conversation, that lateral conversation, led to a breakthrough in oral health that they were able to apply that became something that changed her division. So these are the most powerful and most impactful, and most people overlook them, or they are doing it and they don’t know it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, yeah, I love that. And there’s just so much opportunity for that inside an organization, outside an organization. Yeah, it’s really cool. And for those, again, who haven’t had the opportunity to read Deborah’s book, there’s a ton of examples and stories throughout the book. It’s really a wonderful read, Deborah. There’s another question that I have for you before I let you go, and that is one that asked all my guests, and it’s, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Deborah Heiser
That everyone has a story and that it doesn’t matter. You can pass a person and think, Oh, they’re dressed a certain way, or they present in a certain way. There’s a story in there, and that story is probably one that can be very helpful to you. So just look for the story in people. Don’t pass people by at a conference or at work and think there’s no way I can help them, or they can’t help me. Everyone has a story, and it’s usually beneficial to us.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Deborah, where can folks find a copy of your book? Where can they get more information about the work that you do?
Deborah Heiser
You can find the book anywhere you buy books. It’s available in all formats. So if you are an audio person, it’s available in audio book, Kindle and hard copy, literally anywhere you buy books. And you can find me at mentorproject.org, deborahheiser.com, on LinkedIn, Psychology Today. Just look around. You’ll find me.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome again. The name of the book The mentorship edge creating maximum impact through lateral and hierarchical mentoring. Fantastic read. And Deborah, I appreciate you being on the show. It was just a privilege having you here today. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time take care.
Contact Dr. Deborah Heiser
Dr. Deborah Heiser is an applied developmental psychologist, the CEO/Founder of The Mentor Project, and author of The Mentorship Edge. She is a TEDx speaker, a member of Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, Thinkers 50 Radar List, an expert contributor to Psychology Today, and is also an Adjunct Professor.
Want to learn more about Daphne Dickopf’s work at The Mentor Project? Check out her website at https://www.deborahheiser.com/ and get a copy of her book The Mentorship Edge: Creating Maximum Impact through Lateral and Hierarchical Mentoring on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Mentorship-Edge-Unlocking-Potential-Nurturing/dp/1394267118/ref=sr_1_1
You can also connect with her on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah-heiser-phd/ or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/deborah_heisertmp/