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:

- Why mentorship fosters generativity for stage 5 legacy

- How to implement hierarchical mentoring for team growth

- What lateral mentoring enhances cross-functional collaboration

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

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/


Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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,

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.