When Mentorship Works — And When It’s Not Enough

At several points in my career, I sought out a mentor because I felt stuck.

On paper, I was doing well: I was delivering. I was reliable. I enjoyed what I was doing. But I often had the sense that I was circling some sort of ceiling, unsure what I wasn’t seeing, but definitely feeling like the path to promotion was shrouded in fog.

What I didn’t need was generic encouragement. I needed someone who could look at how I was thinking and say, “Here’s a pattern I see you repeating,” or “Here’s an assumption that might be limiting you.”

That’s what good mentorship does. And I’ve had some great ones. Technical mentors, business mentors, leadership mentors, and yes, even now in this next stage of my career, coaching mentors.

A valuable mentor does not simply dispense advice, and they certainly don’t turn into a second manager or a career counselor on unpaid retainer. They bring perspective to sharpen your judgment. They help you see the system you’re operating inside more broadly. They challenge you when your reasoning is solid but incomplete.

A mistake I made early on was assuming that the responsibility for that kind of relationship would sit entirely on the mentor. I couldn’t have been more wrong. That became even clearer when I was asked to become a mentor myself.

The most effective mentorship relationships I’ve seen, and experienced, have one thing in common: the mentee owns the agenda. They bring real decisions or tradeoffs they’re wrestling with. They do the work between conversations and come back with what changed. The mentor offers perspective and insight, not prescriptions and templates.

Without that mentee ownership, mentorship drifts into pleasant conversation. Without that mentor restraint, it drifts into instruction. With both, though, mentorship accelerates growth, often for the mentee and the mentor alike.

Great mentorships helped me move both my skillset and mindset forward. Great mentees helped me improve my own judgment, expand my frames of reference, and refine my thinking.

Over time, these relationships helped me get clarity on what was keeping me in place and what I needed to strengthen to move ahead. Eventually I reached a point where I wasn’t unclear on how to lead at the next level anymore because I was already operating there in many respects.

What was missing wasn’t perspective. It was visibility.

That’s when I began to understand the difference between mentorship and sponsorship.

Mentors develop you. Sponsors advocate for you.

Both matter. They solve different problems at different stages.

Where leaders get stuck is in staying in development mode long after they are capable of more. They continue to improve, assuming that growth alone will surface them. Sometimes it does. Often, it doesn’t.

It’s hard for anyone to advocate for what they haven’t seen. Organizations promote people they trust and people they can see operating at the next level. That requires demonstrated impact and a willingness to signal aspiration with clarity, not ego.

The harder question many leaders avoid asking themselves is this: Am I still building skill, or am I ready but unknown?

If you are unclear on how to lead at the next level, mentorship is the right investment. Find the right mentor, structure the relationship well, and bring real work to it. Own your growth.

If you are already operating at that level but the right people do not know it, the lever shifts. Development remains important, but visibility becomes the constraint.

I’ve added two new pieces to the Leadership Growth & Advancement section of the library this week that explore both sides of this equation.

The first is a simple framework that walks through how to build mentorship relationships that sharpen judgment and accelerate growth.

The second clarifies the distinction between mentorship and sponsorship and includes a short diagnostic to help you identify which constraint might be limiting you right now.

Everything in the library is free. Take what you need, leave the rest, ask for what’s missing.

If you’re serious about evolving your leadership, it’s worth being honest about which lever you need to pull next. These documents can help you get started. I can help you build on them from there.