A mentor is someone who sees more ability within you than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out. Bob Goshen.

Who would you call, beyond your family, to share good news or to ask for advice or to share a difficult situation at work? Right now, many of us are writing plans for next year and thinking about all the ways we can improve what we do.

But our thoughts are rarely as specific when it comes to the people we might choose to influence us next year. And before we know it the calendar is set, meetings and dates locked in place and we forget to set aside time to invest in ourselves.

This post shares ten principles it’s good to keep in mind when we are looking for a mentor.

Dave Henderson was the best mentor I ever had. We taught together at Twyford CE School in Acton for 5 years. He was extraordinary. On the one hand he was really tough on standards. In an era before consistent whole school practices, he was strict, bringing discipline where it was needed in a large secondary school in London. He made adults reflect on what we were doing: behaviour routines, being on top of uniform, how we spoke about children in the staffroom. But on the other hand, he shared something personal of himself with pupils. He was honest and real in front of London kids, in an era when the term ‘authentic leader’ was waiting to be invented.

This balance of strict and openhearted honesty left pupils spellbound. You wanted to pull out a notebook out when you watched him delivering assemblies to jot down tips, but you couldn’t, because you were watching the way that every eye in the audience was trained on him, bewitched.

He taught maths, led pastoral care, told stories, coached girls’ hockey. Each break-time kids wanted to be in Mr H’s office. Pupils were slightly wary of him, but they knew deep in their bones that he was there to improve everything about their experience at school: end disruptive classrooms, run quality sports clubs, deal with poor teaching.

And of course, I wanted to work alongside him. I wanted him to be my mentor. But no one put us together into any sort of mentoring programme, or timetabled lots of one-to-one meetings. That wouldn’t have worked, because he wouldn’t have sat still for that long, and I wouldn’t have had time in my full timetable for a meeting. Instead, his influence on me happened naturally.

1/ Responsibility for finding your mentor lies with you, not your workplace
Ask for help not because you’re weak, but because you want to remain strong. Les Brown

Sometimes we are lucky, and the stars align so that our line manager also becomes a life-long mentor. But mostly these are two separate people. Mostly our mentors are not set up for us. We don’t want something laid on that is deemed useful for us by others, like a mentoring meeting. Or the way mentoring is often wrapped up can feel cringey: ‘good morning everyone, these people are available for mentoring, just sign up here…’

Not everything has to be a formal process to be meaningful. Real life is where I see the way someone works, ask them about it, wonder I could ever be as good at it as them, shadow them for a while, try to learn what they do effortlessly.

2/ Mentors teach us the love of the work
In my twenties and thirties, neither the appraisal system nor performance targets helped me improve. And they certainly didn’t inspire me. Instead, I was convinced, wooed and lulled into the joys of doing dedicated work by mentors who clearly loved what they did.

As my mentor, Dave would breakdown some of the pastoral tips and tricks for me, the key things that made the difference in a school, where behaviour was often challenging. How to turn a behaviour incident into an opportunity for learning. How to discover who’d bullied who, or started the fight, or stole the phone. How to deliver feedback. Apprentices need real problems that need fixing, not arbitrary targets. We want to be given real challenges that, if we can master them, will make lives better, easier.

It’s mesmerising having time alongside your mentor. Someone who performs a particular skill set with more impact than their peers, perhaps better than anyone else in the building. And you don’t want them to dumb down the difficult skill – we don’t expect it to be simple. In fact, the degree of difficulty is important. As is the belief that one day I might, with the help of my mentor, be able to reach that level.

3/ Feedback comes best from those you trust most
Receiving feedback is hard. And deciding whether or not the person giving the feedback has your best interests in mind can lead to confusion. For that reason, having a mentor who’s both objective and a supporter is crucial. 

Dave would tell me when I’d got something wrong, with no one else around. It was hard to hear, because we respected him so much, but the next day it was like the conversation had never happened. That was how I learned that tomorrow is another day. We forgive and move on.

Mentors help you gather feedback about what isn’t working. Ask yourself who in your network: gets’ it? (understands your context and can empathise)? Asks you the ‘difficult’ questions (challenges you)? Can you really ‘trust’ (with this level of vulnerability)?

4/ Show, not tell
The process of mentoring began in fourth century BC Athens, with young men learning a trade while working alongside skilled blacksmiths, potters and tailors. In 15th century Britain seven year-long apprenticeships (the first internships) began within the medieval craft guilds. Apprentices learnt the trade by watching masters and imitating them. The repetitive nature of skill acquisition may be boring, but if the apprentice persists, the learning becomes automatic, we take on feedback, move into flow, and on toward mastery.

Sometimes feedback isn’t enough. Often, we need a trusted colleague to break down the first two or three things that need to happen first and then show or model this for us. They could help us streamline a process, (a behaviour system or spreadsheet) or to simplify (help me delegate or manage my budget) or to model (to step in to chair a meeting). We are strangely awkward about asking for this kind of help, yet it should be easy to ask: ‘you find this process easier than me, so can you help show me how to do it better?’

I don’t remember one to one meetings with my mentor. What I actually remember are things we did together: leading a presentation with parents or meeting with a challenging parent, and then executing it together, deciding who would say what and when, and then chatting about it afterwards. These weren’t formulaic meetings, they were blocks of time together where we’d talk things through.

Too often professional development programmes preoccupy with a training program which is all about acquiring skill, without recognising that we often work best when we work alongside. This is one of the reasons why the NPQs don’t work in isolation. Mastering the essential job skills is a start, but effective mentors help embed this knowledge by doing difficult things together. This is the transformative potential of mentoring.

Find someone who can help you to download in situ, what you have learnt in theory.

5/ Know when we need it most
The apprenticeship era is one when we are in the crucible of formation: During this phrase all our future powers are in development, underneath the surface our minds are transforming in ways we cannot see. like the chrysalis of a butterfly. Robert Greene

I asked my scientist son, now 26, what it was like to start his job (outside teaching):
When I started, lots of training procedures were thrown at us as pdfs and we were expected to absorb it all and get on. It was boring – it needed personalising, bringing to life. I wanted to see someone do the difficult things – presenting, running meetings, bringing new ideas and persuading people. I wanted them to help me do all of that.

Mentoring is most crucial for younger or less experienced staff. We have formal mentoring programmes for Early Career Teachers, but often this exists only for novices, after which we hope all will be OK. And we wonder why we lose so many teachers in their third and fourth year from the profession. Teaching is a job you do on your own for five hours a day, on your feet, in front of thirty kids, so you need adults to fall back on. You can’t learn this stuff in isolation. Check on your newest recruits more often than you think is necessary.

6/ Be specific about what we need
It’s important to know precisely what help I’m looking for. We spend our lives thinking that someone else (our mentor or line manager or coach) can help eliminate our weaknesses. But the reality is that these people will want to work with you because they see strength and potential waiting to be realised. So, it’s probably wiser to choose your mentor based on which emerging strengths you possess (or hidden strengths you think may be dormant) which you’d like to grow.

You could make a short list of the people you don’t yet know personally, but who have strong knowledge or experience in an aspect of strength, or a field you wish to become expert in. The more we surround yourself with experts in a field we are interested in, the more this rubs off.

7/ Giving advice
We often think there’s a simple division between:
mentoring = giving advice
coaching = all about listening

But as a mentor, in reality it’s much more subtle than that. The best mentors rarely tell. I think it is much more about being alongside, doing things together, me watching you work and you watching me work. Giving advice? Not so much. In The Advice Trap, MB Stanier says we must tame our ‘advice monster’. We need to recognise that because we’ve been asked to be the mentor, we think we must have the answer.

One of the biggest challenges for those mentoring is to provide the right advice which helps ensure that this helps the receiver make good decisions when alone on the job. I’m learning lots from @SCottinghatt and her work on helping teachers make better in-the-moment decisions. It’s no good asking for advice when you’re with Y4 on Thursday morning at 10.10am – mentoring needs to equip people’s thinking so they can think on their feet.

8/ Choose a mentor who is kind
Kindness at its simplest means putting others first, and putting our own interests, work and ambitions second. It means coming alongside and listening to people, thinking deeply about what will most help them, and then acting on that. It means giving our time.

Good mentors are transparent in their thinking, and by sharing their own experience and revealing important parts of themselves this provides colour and context to how they lead. This authenticity creates the terrain where I can be honest about the things I am finding difficult. Where I don’t have to second guess what I’m saying. Where I’m not afraid to let my guard down.

9/ Humility
It takes humility to know that you need a mentor. It means you are prepared to learn, and expose your faults to the outside world. But it also take courage to know when to move on. Recently a colleague spoke to me about the legacy of a previous mentor: I attributed a lot of my strengths to my mentor (their energy and ability to get the best out of me), which leaves me thinking – maybe I’m not able to do it without them.  This has left me stuck in a kind of limbo.

10/ Know when to step back
Mentors need to be available to help, but must avoid doing all the thinking. We need to emerge from their support stronger, more independent, ready to face the world. Mentors have to be available at the right time, but they need to know when to shrink into the background. This is the essential humility necessary in a mentor: to remember it’s not about me.

There are specific times in our career when what we need from our mentor – the person who most constantly believes in us and in our ability to make positive change – is to instil hope. Dave Henderson, my mentor from thirty years ago died earlier this year, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. I’m ashamed to say I’d lost touch. How many lives does a teacher change? I don’t know. But he changed mine, and I wish I’d told him.