Mentorship

If you have a young man in your life, and you're not admiring him and telling him so, you're doing him harm. — Robert Bly

Purpose

To promote mature mentorship

by empowering each new leader to innovate and lead

while keeping true to the purpose and core values

of MentorDiscoverInspire

Mentoring Is Not Coaching Or Teaching

teaching : the transfer of domain-relevant knowledge and skills

coaching : the provision of training or guidance, for the purpose of increasing skill and/or achieving goals, via skill-building activities, accountability, and relevant feedback, usually in a specific skill domain

mentoring : the provision of guidance, advice, and support to help suomeone gain knowledge, skills, and overall success over time, within the context of a sustained relationship

Mentoring includes teaching, but teaching can be done alone without mentoring.

Mentoring does not employ the authoritativeness of specific assignments and goals with accountability, elements that we usually see in coaching.

However it is possible (and common) for a mentor to also simultaneously be a coach and a teacher, to the same person and in the same skill domain. When they are teaching through one-way giving of knowledge they are not in that moment being a mentor. When they are coaching by direct assignment of tasks and goals with accountability they are not in that moment being a mentor.

The Be-Do-Have Analogy

For anyone familiar with Be-Do-Have or the principles behind CPAR, it is easy to see the relationship between the three modalities above and the corresponding triad of Be/Do/Have or Context/Purpose/Results:

modality	is about	be-do-have	CPRA
Teaching	what you know	Have (knowledge)	Results (newly) acquired learning)
Coaching	what you are doing	Do (tasks/goals)	Purpose (to do these tasks/goals)
Mentoring	who you are being	Be	Context

Developing Relationship

Any given mentoring relationship will contain some fraction of each of the three elements, e.g. 60% mentoring, 20% coaching and 20% teaching. The balance might shift over time as necessary, e.g. when the existing well-known skills are insufficient in the moment and new skills are needed.

In general, the greater amount of trust there is, the more mentoring can be done while still achieving skill-domian improvement. This would suggest one should start with all teaching/coaching, then introduce pure mentoring only after the relationship has built — but teaching/coaching are not nearly as good for building connection and tacit trust. In particular, if trust is not present at all, the teaching and coaching will fall flat.

The following address only the mentorship aspect of any teaching/coaching/mentoring relationships.

Qualities of an Effective Mentor

Mentor has on-the-field experience in the relevant skill domain

Mentor is clear on his core values¹ or guiding principles as relates to his personal life, relationships with others, and relevant skill domains

Mentor is committed to learning as well as teaching

Mentor is invested in the results, outcome, and effects of the protoge's duty effectiveness

Qualities of an Effective Mentorship Relationship

There is domain-relevant transferable knowledge

The relationship is mature and masculine²

There is rapport between mentor and protoge

There is no power dynamic, i.e. the mentor does not have power or authority over the protoge and vice-versa

The mentor emphasises witnessing over speaking

The mentor asks opening questions

The mentor exercises restraint

In my experience, many of the younger members are looking for [mentoring], as long as us older men stick to mentoring and not start giving old man advice. — Olaf Krop July 9, 2025

Footnotes

1 : core values : for a general description of core values or guiding principles, see the MCV article. (That article also gives a specific example of one person's core values.)

2 : masculine : or feminine, or bilateral, as is appropriate:

masculine if mentor and protoge identify as male,
feminine if mentor and protoge identify as female,
bilateral if one of each: a relationship that is mature in the
sense of a healthy (heterosexual) marriage.

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2025 Nov 06.

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