My book, Leading From the Floor, didn’t start as a book. It started as notes.
In 2022, a young leader I was mentoring, who was just starting to think seriously about a management career, began coming to me with problems as they came up: a conflict with a peer, a decision she wasn’t sure how to make, a moment where she doubted herself in front of her team. I answered each one as it came, in whatever order her week happened to raise them.
After a while, I noticed something. Most of what she was struggling with, I’d struggled with myself a few years earlier. So I started writing down what we talked about, and eventually reorganizing it — not in the order the problems came up, but in the order that would make the most sense to someone reading it from the start. That reorganized version became the book.
What Mentoring Her Gave Me
Most advice about becoming a mentor focuses on what it gives the other person: guidance, encouragement, a sounding board. That’s true, but it undersells what it does for the mentor.
Trying to help her forced me to be more intentional about my own leadership than I’d previously been. Explaining a principle clearly enough for someone else to use it meant I couldn’t just operate on instinct anymore. I had to know what I was doing and why, well enough to teach it. And once I’d said something out loud as advice, I had to actually live it.
I found that out directly. I’d told her to stay focused on what was truly important during a shift, and to delegate or ignore the minor annoyances that show up in the middle of one. A couple of days later, I caught myself deep in a problem any one of my direct reports could have handled, while the bigger picture I was ultimately responsible for wasn’t being monitored. There wasn’t a dramatic moment where someone called it out. It just hit me, out of nowhere, that I was doing exactly what I’d told her not to do. I handed the problem off and went back to watching what mattered.
That pressure to consistently practice what I was teaching is what prepared me for the role I’m in now, teaching hundreds of new managers how to do their jobs well, instead of running one team directly. It wasn’t the notes themselves, and it wasn’t the book that eventually came from them. What made the difference was the deliberate, focused thought I had to put into my own actions, because I was accountable to someone else’s growth. This intentionalality made me a better leader in so many ways. I don’t think I’d have been ready for my current role without that pressure forcing the change first.
The Relationship Doesn’t Stay Fixed
Those conversations started in 2022. Four years later, she’s gone from an entry-level employee to managing a department, and now runs employee training for her site. I’ve gone from supervising 3-4 department managers and a team of roughly 120 people, to teaching new managers across 70 sites how to do the job well — trading direct oversight of one team for influence over how dozens of teams get led. Neither of us is where we were when this started, and neither of us needs the same thing from the other that we did back then.
But the relationship didn’t end when the original need did. We still check in periodically, and it’s not one-directional anymore; she’s helped me think through things just as often as I’ve helped her, especially anything closer to her current expertise than mine. Most advice about mentorship describes it as a role you occupy. You’re the mentor, they’re the mentee, and the relationship exists to close that gap. That’s true at the start but it doesn’t have to stay true, and treating the roles as fixed is a good way to let a valuable relationship fizzle out the moment the original gap closes.
Final Thoughts
Becoming a mentor isn’t a status you earn once and hold. It’s noticing when you have something worth organizing and sharing with someone else, and doing it. Be willing to let the relationship change shape with time, instead of assuming it has to run in the same direction forever. Sometimes that means a mentee becomes someone who helps you back years later, in ways neither of you expected when it started.
The mentee I started taking notes for in 2022 didn’t just get a mentor. She got a more intentional leader than I would have become without her — and four years later we’ve both benefited from the relationship.
From Theory to Action
1. Write down one piece of advice you’ve given informally more than once. Organize it into something you can quickly and easily hand someone the next time the question comes up.
2. Notice whether explaining something out loud changes how you think about it yourself. If it does, that pressure is worth using deliberately, not just noticing by accident.
3. Revisit one mentoring relationship you’ve assumed has a fixed direction. Consider whether the other person has something to teach you now, even if that wasn’t true when the relationship started.
4. Stop waiting to feel qualified before you start organizing what you already know for someone else. The organizing is often what makes you qualified, not the other way around.
For the mechanics of finding a mentor for yourself, see Find a Mentor and The Role of Mentorship. For what this compounds into over time, see Mentors Advise. Sponsors Advocate. and Leadership Capital.
This is one of the underestimated benefits of coaching and mentoring: it forces you to turn instinct into a framework. Something you’ve done almost automatically for ten years suddenly becomes difficult when someone asks, ‘Why exactly do you do it that way?’ Explaining it often improves your own thinking as much as theirs.