This One's For Len. The Mentor of Mentors.
A piece on the value of mentoring in honor of my late grandfather, Len Corcoran
Tuesday On a Friday
This week’s tidbit is a tad bit late, I know. But it’s for very good reason. My grandfather, who was more of like a father figure to me, passed away this week and I was doing a bit of traveling for the funeral. I thought I would take some time and pay tribute to the man that started me down this journey of leadership and development coaching while, at the same time, leaving you guys with a thought on mentoring. I know it’s a bit off the Kanban and Agile path, but I think it will be helpful.
Find A Mentor
My grandfather, Len Corcoran, was an interesting mentor for me. I say that because I spent most of the time with him actually resisting and resenting the work we did. That sounds awful, I know, but at the time I felt like a fish out of water. I had just dropped out of my first attempt at college and I was living with my parents when my dad informed me, “Your grandfather has offered to let you come live and work with him. And you’re going to do it.” I was caught off guard for sure. I lived in Birmingham, Alabama at the time and I had a life I thought I loved. It was absolutely directionless, but I was oblivious. I was a cocky 21 year old with an over indulged ego and I thought I knew everything. This was going to be an interesting year.
Fast forward a decade and I know that year I spent interning with my grandfather was the pivot point in my career. Regardless of the resistance, spending so much time handling the material and conversations planted seeds that have sprouted with some deep roots. I got to record the speech workshops and coaching sessions he would give on a regular basis. He had me copy edit his writing for his course material and early books. As I would drive him to various consulting engagements, he would ask questions, listen, and divulge wisdom from years and years of iteration and experience. Whether I knew it or not he was modeling the kind of coaching I am so passionate about now and I was hearing ideas and questions that still drive me to improve today.
He was an excellent mentor and that taught me that everyone should find a mentor. Mentors have ages of failures and learnings we can only dream of. Find a mentor, take them to lunch, and just listen. Let them ask questions. Disagree with them. Lord knows I did.
My grandfather was excellent at sucking people in with questions during a disagreement, after which he would gracefully lead them, not to a conclusion, but to more questions. For me, the questions themselves left me either more irritated or, more often than not, intrigued at what I had missed. Great mentors have a way of breaking you without you knowing it. The pain is there. The churn of battling the questions you knew you had answers to is there. My gramps would just sit there and smile and then entertain the next question. That’s what a great mentor does.
Find a mentor.
Reproduce Yourself Exponentially
The other thing my grandfather did was make himself larger than just his immediate circle. In our last conversation before he passed away, I told him about all the work I was doing because of what I learned from him. I still remember the look on his face as he started to smile. He started asking me questions and looking for more details about the work I was doing, including this blog. He seemed like that same man that would quiz me all those years ago. It was a great chat.
Afterwards, someone that was watching the interaction came up and said, “Tristan, I don’t know what you two were talking about, but that’s the most animated he’s been in months. Normally he just sits there and nods.” I like to think that a little piece of him was glad that his life’s work would touch lives he would never meet, because that’s what mentoring does.
Don’t just find a mentor. Be a mentor yourself. Or, at least, know that who you are is replicating itself in other people’s lives. With that knowledge I have become a bit more cognizant of what I do and consume. I’m not saying be fake. Just know the weight of the actions you take. To someone, you may be a model or mentor. Treat that with the proper due diligence. The life you are impacting now could be some egotistical, head strong 21 year old that will go on to write a blog that reaches untold numbers of people.
Be a mentor.
Thanks to a Good Man
To round out the tidbit, I want to say this one’s for Len Corcoran, or Grampa as we called him. More than his mentorship, he was a great man. He was a great man that, as I mentioned, took most of us in a time or two and taught us how to be better men along the way. He taught us what it was to work hard, love and accept people without accepting their behavior, and how to be charitable in a world that lacked it. Thank you for all you did Grampa. It lives on in me.
Until next time,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.