Mentors: cherrypick from the best

No single person will have the range of skills you need. Far better to see the best of the best in action. Picture: iStock

Come with me on a journey through the life cycle and I will point out the teachers, the guides, the role models who can help along the way. And by “help” I don’t mean by making the pathway easier; sometimes the best advice means taking a more difficult route.

Having loving parents is a good start but at some point we start to look for role models beyond the parental orbit. When I was 10 my older brother told me when playing (Aussie rules) football that if I was good enough to get my hands on the ball I was good enough to hold it. He was referring to the skill of marking. It was a metaphor that struck a chord with this working-class kid: you have every right to be in the room and to express an opinion.

I liked school and I admired my teachers. I especially liked history, geography and the sciences. But I never liked writing; I found it tedious. That changed at university when my Masters supervisor walked me carefully through the drafts of my thesis. It was painful being corrected page by page, but it was also character building; being open to learning requires patience and humility.

My supervisor didn’t correct me in a general sense; he showed me where improvements could be made. He would often change a single word and say, “Do you not see this is a more elegant way of expressing that thought?” It was revelatory. I couldn’t get enough of writing at this level. It was like being in an exclusive club. I took that skill into consulting and produced reports that I knew were written to a higher standard. Good skills deliver self-confidence.

And then there are the workplace mentors. Early in my consulting career I had a boss with an extraordinary mind for people, figures and precedents that could be brought to bear in a moment to support an argument. It seemed to me he knew every suburb in every Australian city. He could look at a table of figures and say, “That number can’t be right” and invariably he was correct. He could spot an inconsistency, an illogicality, in an instant. Seeing these skills demonstrated every day was impressive and I was determined to learn how to do the same.

I have made a career out of contextualising numbers, identifying social trends and theorising about Australia’s cities and regions. These skills were honed by exposure to bosses, colleagues, university lecturers and others from whom I cherrypicked the expertise I most admired. I didn’t know precisely what I wanted to do when I was starting out but I knew what I found interesting and the skills, demonstrated by others, I wanted to acquire.

The life lesson I have learnt is that mentors are around us all the time. They teach by example. Their intellect, their character, the way they interact with staff, clients and others is on display every day in the workplace. Even the demeanour by which they answer the phone can be instructive. Which is why young people will miss out on this incidental mentoring by working from home.

The challenge for young people is to work out what they want to learn and who has the best skills and expertise in a particular field. Being exposed to best-in-class thinking, to seeing such skills on display every day, resets the bar of excellence and drives the determination to be even better.

Life’s journey isn’t so much about getting the right mentor. No single person will have the range of skills you need. Far better to see the best of the best in action and resolve to learn how to lift your game to equal and perhaps exceed the prevailing standard. And in many ways this is exactly what each generation should aim to do – strive to improve upon those who went before.