The mentor you want is rarely the mentor you need
National Mentoring Day on 27 October will likely bring a lot of warm words about the value mentoring delivers; most of them are true. However, few statements truly get into the weeds of how to get the most out of the relationship.
If you’re running a small business and thinking about finding a mentor, the advice you’ll mostly get is ‘find a good person’, ‘meet regularly’, ‘absorb their wisdom’. None of that is wrong, but there’s more to it.
I’ve mentored more than a dozen SME leaders through the government-backed Help to Grow: Management Course and many more in my own practice, and the pattern is consistent. The mentor who transforms one business may be no use at all to another – not because they’re a worse mentor, but because they’re wearing the wrong hat for that leader’s particular problem.
There are many types of mentors, and you’ll need different ones at different points in your business journey. Knowing which you need, and when, is most of the work. Below, I’ve outlined some of the key ones that many leaders may underestimate.
The sounding board mentor
This one is all about listening, without rushing in with an answer. I’ve had sessions where I say almost nothing for the first fifteen minutes, because the mentee starts answering my questions before I get a chance to ask them. The value isn’t expertise, it’s having somewhere to think out loud with someone who won’t jump in and solve it for you.
If you run a business, you probably have nobody like this. Richard Sadler started CJC Aggregates and Landscaping Supplies in his early 50s and has grown it from nothing to £1.6m turnover in just over four years. His co-founder is, by Richard’s own account, brilliant on the operational side but not a strategist. In short, there was simply no one for Richard to think with, which is where his Help to Grow: Management Course mentor came in.
“My mentor gave me a sounding board, but more than that, he drew out answers I already had instinctively and gave me the confidence to act on them,” he says. “That’s harder to find than it sounds.”
It is. And the most experienced person you know is not automatically the best listener, often the opposite. The better sounding board is invested in you, not in a particular answer.
The critical friend mentor
This mentoring persona isn’t afraid to ask uncomfortable questions, whether that’s challenging your values or stress-testing the bits of the business you’d rather not look at. One of the hardest things I ask leaders to do is go back to their own team and ask: “what’s it really like to work for me?” Most people flinch.
In a small business, nobody on your payroll is going to volunteer this. Your team reports to you. Your co-founder (if you have one) is probably your friend. The uncomfortable question has to come from outside, or it doesn’t come at all.
One leader I mentored had been avoiding a difficult conversation with a major client over a values clash. She raised it. They took it seriously enough to change their approach, and invited her to train their teams.
But the challenge only works if you let it land. When Sarah Williams, co-founder of creative visual agency Darklight Digital, joined the Help to Grow: Management Course she deliberately chose a mentor from outside her industry, and is blunt about what the mentee has to bring.
“It’s important to be vulnerable and give your mentor a lot of honest information about your business,” she says. “There can’t be any smoke and mirrors if you really want to get the most out of the mentoring, but the relationship creates a safe space to have very honest and frank conversations.”
What she got back justified the exposure.
“My mentor didn’t beat around the bush and helped me focus on making things happen, and that directness was exactly what we needed.”
The helicopter view mentor
The third hat is about seeing the bigger picture, which is what you lose when you’re so deep in day-to-day problem solving that you’ve quietly become the bottleneck for every decision in the business.
One leader I worked with was so far into that trap they considered walking away entirely. Through mentoring, they learned to step back. Decisions started filtering through a newly empowered team, and the business went from strength to strength, eventually acquiring others. They didn’t need to work harder. They needed someone who could see more than was visible from inside their own inbox.
Sometimes what that view reveals is embarrassingly simple. For Richard Sadler, it was a customer database he’d never used.
“I’d built the business to £1.5m turnover without ever using my customer database properly or a CRM system,” he says. “What mattered was how he framed it, not as a failing, but as an exciting opportunity.”
They rebuilt the website with the CRM at its core. The habit stuck and Richard now highlights “the discipline of stepping back to work on the business rather than just in it” as the most valuable thing mentoring gave him.
Three hats, and no leader needs all of them at once. The mentor who is exactly right for you in your first year of trading may be the wrong person entirely by your fifth. That isn’t a failure of the relationship, it’s a sign the business has moved.
So, before you go looking, work out which one you’re short of. Someone to think with, someone to challenge you, or someone to lift your eyes up. It’s a more useful question than “who’s the best mentor I can get?”, and the answer to it is what separates a pleasant conversation from a business that changes.
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