Nobody ever told him the actual thing

I worked with a candidate a while back who had been passed over for leadership roles three or four times. Good clinician. Well liked. Not a mystery to anybody in the building. And every time he didn't get it, somebody would take him for a coffee and tell him to keep his head up, his time would come, they'd been through the same thing.

All of that was kind, and none of it was useful, right? Nobody ever told him the actual thing. It took a structured process — real feedback, written down, specific enough that he could go do something with it on a Tuesday morning. He did the work, he got the role, and he's been good in it.

I've been on the other side of that too. About fifteen years ago I was a year into a project, unhappy the whole time, absolutely convinced I was doing great work. I had colleagues. I had relationships. Not one of them said the thing to my face. It took a 360 to tell me: Kevin knows what needs to be done, he's got the competence — but Kevin's not happy, and he's bringing unhappy Kevin to work every day.

That's the difference I keep coming back to.

Mentorship is a gift. It is not a plan.

I'm not down on informal mentorship. Some of the best leaders I've placed had somebody in their corner early who changed the shape of their career, and they'll tell you about that person twenty years later.

But look at what has to line up for it to happen. The right person has to be in the building. They have to have time. The chemistry has to work. They have to be willing to say the hard part out loud to somebody they see in the hallway every day and will still see next week. And the person being mentored has to be visible enough to get picked in the first place — which, in most organizations, quietly means they have to remind the mentor of themselves.

That's a lot of coincidence. When it lands it's wonderful. You just can't build a leadership pipeline on it, because you cannot manufacture it on demand for the next twelve people you promote. Some of your leaders will have it and some won't, and it usually isn't the ones who need it most.

A structured process doesn't depend on luck. It has a defined start, a defined cadence, and a defined end. In our case that's six months, twice a month, with an external certified coach who doesn't work for me and has no stake in how it looks. It starts at selection rather than after the start date, and whatever surfaced during the search gets carried gently into the first conversation, so nobody has to spend six weeks explaining themselves. The mentor tells you what they would have done. The coach helps the person work out how they're actually going to show up. Those are different jobs.

The scalable part is that it's a decision, not a coincidence. You commit to it once and every leader gets it — the internal promotion, the external hire, the person nobody would have picked out of the crowd.

Three things I'd do

Decide who gets it before you know who they are. "Everyone stepping into a leadership seat" is a policy. "People we think need help" is a judgment call you'll get wrong.

Make it someone with no stake in the outcome. Not their boss, not their boss's boss, not the person who hired them. Nobody says the hard part to somebody who writes their review.

Put a clock on it. Six months, a set cadence, a defined finish. Open-ended support quietly becomes no support, and stuff like that just fades out around month four when everybody gets busy.

Keep the mentorship. Keep every bit of it. Just don't let it be the plan.

Take care of the people that take care of us.

Kevin