The Mentorship Edge: Creating Maximum Impact through Lateral and Hierarchical Mentoring (Part 2)

Welcome to Readers, the podcast for the lifelong learner. Join us on our weekly dose of wisdom where we talk about the real-life lessons and applications of books. Enjoy. Welcome back to Readers, everyone. Today we are once again joined by Ms. Deborah Heiser, developmental psychologist, founder of the Mentor Project, TEDx speaker, and author of The Mentorship Edge. Welcome back to the podcast, Deborah. So glad to have you back.

So glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to part 2. Well, you know, in part 1, we discussed how humans are hardwired to mentor and the 5 key components of mentoring. Today, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into different mentoring styles, mentoring in the workplace, and the future of mentoring. So without further ado, let's dive right into Chapter 5, which is all about mentoring styles. So, you know, from my experience and also from what I know about other people, I think a lot of people have had a lot of different experiences with mentoring, right? Some professional, some personal, some supported them through a hard time and others pushed them harder than they've ever been pushed. The most common type of mentoring, according to you, is hierarchical and reverse mentoring. So I want to ask you, can you talk a little bit about what these two types of mentoring are and where they're most commonly found?

So when we think of work, we usually think of hierarchical mentoring. So when a person says mentor, we think of someone who's above someone in expertise, who's usually above them in rank, either at work or university or someplace like that, and they are imparting their knowledge and wisdom to the next generation. So that's the most common way that we think about it. And reverse mentoring is that person who is a younger generation who is giving or imparting their knowledge to someone else. So that could be someone in the workplace who is giving information to a boomer or a Gen Xer about their generation so that they can sell some kind of widget better to that generation that they are looking to sell to. They are using the expertise of that younger generation to help them out. Most people use the example of teaching older people technology, but there's so much more that younger generations are able to give and is often given but overlooked, that it isn't really mentorship. So when we're seeking knowledge in, in the culture or an environment that we're not used to, Oftentimes with a younger generation, we are seeking the expertise and wisdom from that individual or those group of people about that.

Sure. And hierarchical mentoring, although beneficial, seems to be very common, right? At least from what your book— you mentioned that it's seen in the workplace, in school or college, or while playing sports. However, the new type of mentoring that you introduced in your book is much less common, but just as beneficial. And this is lateral mentoring. So can you elaborate a little bit on what this is and what the real difference is between lateral and hierarchical mentoring?

Sure. You know, it's less frequently talked about, but it's actually much more prolifically experienced in the world. So this is when we have two experts, neither of which is the boss of the other, neither of which is hierarchically at a different rank. And so it's— take technology, take entrepreneurship, take any place where you're building something. The founding of our country was founded by people who were experts. No one was the boss. So anytime we have these situations, we're engaging in lateral mentorship. In, in fact, it can happen in schools very frequently. I was a student and asked I was, I had a fellow student who asked me about how to do a statistics that I was very familiar with so that she could get ahead in a project that she was working on. Now, that was me lateral, as a lateral mentor to her. I was teaching her something that she took in and was able to use. We do this all the time, but we don't think of it as mentorship, but it is.

Got it. And I think you also introduce or bring up the concept of peer mentoring, which in your own words focuses on mutual learning and support between peers who may be at the same level within an organization, academic program, or community. It's all about sharing knowledge, experiences, and insights to help each other grow. So I guess the question that kind of comes up here is what's really the difference between peer and lateral mentoring?

You know, there's not a ton of difference with that, but peer mentoring is usually in school settings where they'll set up peer mentoring programs where it is expected that the mentoring is going to happen. So they will say, here, we're going to start this peer mentoring program, two people will meet and they'll be paired up. Whereas in lateral mentoring, we're doing this organically. It's happening where you say, oh my goodness, I just met somebody who is a hardware engineer and I'm a software engineer. I would love to be able to utilize the expertise of this person to get myself ahead. It's not in a formalized setting.

Got it. Got it. And kind of further harping on this lateral mentoring concept here, you talk about something that's becoming a lot more prevalent in our world, right? Startup culture. You mentioned that lateral mentoring is showing up more and more through this medium, and you even give the examples of organizations like Apple or even our founding fathers. So I want to ask, can you talk a little bit about the prevalence of lateral mentoring in such environments and how you see its potential growing more as our world changes and evolves?

Oh, for sure. You know, as we've gotten to become a much more entrepreneurial society and with the inclusion of tech that has really taken over, we have more and more people who are engaging less in a hierarchical fashion with a boss who is overseeing our work and more in an environment where we are needing to seek out the expertise of others in order to advance what we're doing, either build a project or solve a problem or create a company. If we're creating a company from, from scratch, we need to get the other experts in to help us, even if we're an amazing business person.

Yeah.

So the example, one of the examples I give in the book is the Steve and Steve example. And that was where a guy, Steve, was at work, and he had a boss who came in and said, "Hey, I really want you to do this project. You need to get it done. Do you think you can? It's gonna be really hard." And Steve said, "Yeah, sure, I've got it. Don't worry about it." And Steve really didn't. He knew how to get a certain distance with it, but not as far as he needed to to complete it. But he didn't feel like he could trust his boss to tell him that because he thought he'd get fired. So he kept telling his boss day after day, "I've got it, don't worry about it." Well, Steve's boss kept coming back and saying, "Hey, what's going on?" So Steve called his friend Steve, who was at another job, and said, "Steve, I know that you know this kind of engineering that's gonna really help me get this job done. Can you help me out?" Steve said, "Sure, I'll come after work and I'll take a look at it." Now Steve trusted his friend Steve. He was willing to say, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing," to his friend Steve and explain where he was and what he was up to. So Steve comes after work and he takes a look and he says, "Oh yeah, yeah, I think I can help with this. Let me show you what I've got." And they work deep into the night. The next morning Steve goes back. No one ever knows Steve was ever there. And the boss says, "Wow, Steve, you made progress." And Steve said, "I told you I knew what I was doing." The next night, Steve comes back after work. No one ever knew he was coming in. In short, this project got done a week earlier than it needed to get done. And Steve was the big success. Now, here's what it was. This was Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari, and his boss was Al Alcorn. The job he was working on was our first big video game, which was Breakout, which launched Atari. The person who was helping him was Steve Wozniak, and he was a lateral mentor. Steve lateral mentored Steve. Now, we know that that lateral mentoring relationship continued deep into their friendship in different ways. And that's often how it works for us, is that when we call upon somebody for help, they then call upon us for help. And that'll just happen over and over and over again.

Sure. So I guess what you're saying is that as our world kind of moves towards this, almost anyone can be a self-starter, then we resort to more of a flat leadership structure almost where it's less of a chain of commands being passed down from one boss to the other, but rather more of people relying on each other to, you you know, together grow. Which I think is really interesting because I feel like a lot of the findings that you see even today, whether that's in the psychology field or the, you know, organizational management field or leadership or business fields, I feel like a lot of that reflects what you're kind of saying. Even when you look at Adam Grant's work on givers and takers, right, of creating a culture in your workplace where everyone is trying to support and give and in your words, laterally mentor one another. Then that makes for a much better working environment. So I think that's really interesting. But, you know, by now I think we've explored all the, a lot of the different types of mentoring and even the places it's found. But Chapter 6 tells us a lot about where we actually have mentors in our lives. So moving on to Chapter 6, you know, it tells us that we're often even mentors without even knowing it. Teachers, older siblings, or friends can all be mentors. And you mention a lot of stories from everyone from common folk to professional athletes to, you know, even Steve Jobs. Right. But can you share a personal anecdote about where you found mentorship in your life when you needed it most?

I'll go back to when I was 5. When I was 5, my grandfather took me out on car rides every Saturday morning to give my mom a break. And when he did that, he was taking me on all of his errands. So I was riding in his car and he would tell me stories about all the people that we passed along the way. And most people would say, oh, this doesn't matter, but he was telling me these in-depth stories about people. And I didn't know if he knew them or not, but I at 5 assumed he must have. But as we passed somebody, he'd say, oh, you see Mary there? She had a She had a hard life, you know, she had to put her kids through college, but now she's, you know, feeling so great because the kids have done so well. Or look at that guy over there on the bench, you know, his wife just chewed him out for not bringing home the, for not taking in the dry cleaning. And he would tell me all these stories. And what he told me time and time again was every person has a story.

Story.

And so rather than just passing people, I imagined stories for each person that we would pass, intricate, complex stories. And, you know, I became a psychologist, part of that is because I want to see the story in everybody. So these relationships that we have early on, often shaped by grandparents or aunts or uncles or other you know, friends of families can be some of the most inspiring forms of mentorship that last a lifetime. So I still to this day remember back to those car rides and seeing the story in every person and realizing that we all have a story. So that was— that's just a personal example that stuck with me.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I feel like You, in your book, have done a really good job of making mentorship not only something that's valued in one field or the other, but rather kind of a holistic perspective on how to learn and grow from one another in, you know, the whole game of life, right? Whether that's work, whether that's school, whether that's sports, whether that's, you know, your personal life. And I feel like a lot of people need this mentoring in their personal life, and a lot of people also need it in the workplace, right? And I guess I kind of want to go back into this, you know, question that I was kind of asking about the startups and the companies. But whether that's the social life within a new company or the workplace culture, or even learning the ropes at a new job, right? Everyone should have a mentor that helps them succeed. And in chapter 7, you mentioned that mentoring in the workplace doesn't have to be a one-on-one process. It can be felt by the culture and the leaders of the organization. So I guess that kind of breaks paradigms a lot of what people thought mentoring typically was. That it doesn't just need to be a, you know, once a week you sit down with this guy who's labeled your mentor and he teaches you about things you've never heard about before, but rather it's a culture almost. So can you talk about what makes such a culture succeed and what leaders need to do in today's world to make that happen?

Oh, absolutely. You know, mentoring is a culture. It's really the core of it is connection, is that we are feeling like we're not in a little silo all by ourselves. So some of the companies that have done a really good job of making this, or organizations, a natural thing, even in a super hierarchical environment, are places like hospitals. You'd think, how can that be? But things like curbside consults that physicians will have, where they will do something where they'll say, hey, have you seen a case like this? Grand rounds, that's where you go and you're able to talk about a patient and people can say, "Oh, I've seen that before." Or they might say, "Ooh, good thing I went to that grand rounds. I was able to understand this better now that I'm seeing this patient. You know, I saw this a couple months ago." Other ways that it happens is, an example is the Iowa federal judges. They knew that a person can't go in and say, "I don't know how to try that case." You know, that would not work out well for them. So they set up informal lunches so that some of the judges could go and meet up with each other. It was a nice, um, organic environment where people could just relax and enjoy themselves, but also seek out lateral mentorship. So a person could say, hey, Jim, I know you tried a case like this a couple years back. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And that's a way of continuing this. It's a culture that you feel comfortable asking questions of others. We know that a lot of the tech companies do this really, really well. And they set it up in an organic way. Python was set up that way, you know, for coding. Other organizations will have it that they'll say, well, we're looking for more creativity or ways in which we can, you know, bring about new ideas. Bell Labs is known for that. That's where, you know, a lot of the big innovations would come out of it. And so that is setting somebody in an environment where they are expected to solve a problem by utilizing their fellow colleagues to ask questions of or to utilize their expertise. So companies that set it up in that way where you are encouraged to have problems solving occur with the use of your colleagues are really good at making that happen. And there are plenty of those out there that have that culture within it so that if you're working all by yourself, you're seen as the one that's an oddball, whereas everybody else is connected and working with each other.

Poking a little bit deeper into that, I think it's very important, I feel like, to create that culture by habits and process where You know, for example, every week we have a couple hours where you're only able to mentor someone else or help someone else with a project or something like that, right? What are some of these processes if you were speaking to, you know, a big president of a huge company like, you know, Apple or like Microsoft that you would kind of help them with in order for them to kind of incorporate the sense of mentorship into their corporation, whether that's at the leadership level or whether that's at the grassroots level of a company. How would you suggest real-life findings based off of your research in order to incorporate this culture of mentorship in the workplace?

One of the biggest ways to do this is through setting up organic opportunities for people to connect. So if you are in a remote company, that can be a weekly meeting that you have where people can meet up with each other and they can talk, and you don't have to have any expectations there. People will automatically start to converse with each other. And an example I can give with that is we have something called Fridays with Fred. It's at the Mentor Project where all the mentors can come together and they meet up and there's no real agenda. Sometimes there's a presentation, but it's a real opportunity for people to come over lunch or breakfast or wherever they are, whatever timeframe that is, for an hour to meet up. And we found an unusual thing that we did not know would happen is that people have started companies based off of it. They have written books together, they've written articles together, they've conducted research based on it. So people automatically, when they're put in an organic situation, will immediately start lateral mentoring like crazy. So setting up conferences, retreats, lunches, any kind of an online experience for people, chat lines like Discord and, you know, any of the other kinds of chat lines that you can set up are ways that get people talking. I know that even Zoom has some capacity for having a chat line. And so just some of these very inexpensive or free things will get people to start talking. And that's where the lateral mentoring happens. The other thing is when we can acknowledge that people have helped us, and that is encouraged, and we say, "Oh my gosh, I just got this great idea from so-and-so. I want to just say thank you to that person." Or we say, "Oh, I just helped out so-and-so. It made me feel so great." So acknowledging either the helping or the being helped in a company is another free example of how we're solidifying some of those connections. So we'll do it over and over again.

Hmm. I think the beautiful thing with mentoring is, you know, it's not something that has to almost be forced on other people or really taught through a certain practice or, you know, training methodology. But I think it's rather something that happens very naturally. Like, if you put people in a room, if you give them the chance to get to know one another, if you give them the chance to network and, you know, they have things in common that they might be working on, I think it's something that happens very naturally. And that's something that you kind of bring up when talking about these big organizations that might want to incorporate such processes in their work. So, you know, I know our time today is kind of coming to an end. Today was a bit of a shorter episode, but I think thus far we've discussed a lot of things, right? We've talked about where define effective mentors, their variety, their uniqueness, and how mentorship can occur in the workplace. I guess my last question, you know, before we end is how have you been able to quantify this mentorship through research? Can you speak a little bit on the research you've done and your findings in relation to defining the real-time effects of mentorship through quantifiable means? I guess to put it into simpler words, right, when you go into a company or an organization and you see that either they have a culture of mentorship or they don't. How are you able to quantify that? How are you able to really gauge that and give an accurate report back? Or for people who are running their own organizations or want to do this someday, how can they take a look at their companies and feel like, "We have a good culture here," or, "We need to work on this"? Is that something that can be quantified?

Yeah, it can. So I'll just give an example through the Mentor Project and how we do that. But this is, if I were to expand it out, I can give some examples of that. But within the Mentor Project, we can see how engaged is the person. Are they actually engaged in things? Do they come to things? Do they interact with others? You can quantify that. You can quantify that by people showing up at meetings, by people, and are they engaging in their work? In the case of the Mentor Project, we can see how many people people are mentoring. How many hours they're putting in. You could see how many sick days people are taking. You could also see what is the— are they completing their projects? Are those getting done? Is there new creativity that's happening? And if you're not seeing that, you might be able to say, you know what, let's try to get some more organic mentoring happening here. I think that these people might be disconnected in this this team or this group. So, by seeing if people are showing up places, by seeing if they are engaging with others, and seeing if the impact of their work changes, and if they're not taking off as much time for sick time. That's— those are some of them. So, within the Mentor Project, we've been able to quantify how many mentoring hours people are engaging in. We're also able to quantify how many outside activities they're doing. How many companies have been started? How many articles have been written? How many books have been written? How many other activities? Are people visiting and meeting up with each other? We found out that a lot of people get together outside of their time together within the Mentor Project. They stay over at people's houses, they go fly to visit each other in other states, they go to do things with each other, and these are people who never knew each other beforehand. So having those kinds of relationships means that they are more committed to an organization if they're engaged in that way. And that would be the same with any kind of company. Are you seeing, you know, an overlap between their personal life and their work life?

Yeah, I feel like based off of your findings and the research you've done, it really just seems like the key or the solution to inducing more and more mentorship in the workplace is really to have a healthy culture of connection and where people feel like they can trust one another and, you know, that they're more than just work colleagues that they see, you know, from their 9 to 5s. But I think that's a great place for us to end this episode. And to any CEOs or presidents of companies out there, you know, I hope, I hope you're listening and, and keep that in mind to create that kind of a culture. I think today we've covered a lot of different topics. We've talked about everything from the different mentorship styles to hierarchical and lateral mentoring. We've talked about mentorship in the workplace and even the future steps ahead for how to quantify that for your own companies. So once again, thank you so much for joining us today, Deborah. It was a real pleasure to have you again, and I'm looking forward to part 3.

Me too. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. And a big thank you also to all of our listeners. We're looking forward to part 3. And until then, keep on learning, keep on changing, and keep on growing. We'll see you next time.