Mentoring: Necessary but Insufficient

Early in my career, I was fortunate to have a mentor who had walked the path before me and generously shared their wisdom. However, as I stepped into more complex leadership roles, I realised something significant: the challenges I faced weren’t the same as theirs, and their advice, while well-intentioned, didn’t always suit my context. I needed more than experience—I needed a way to navigate the unpredictable.

Relying on mentoring alone doesn’t work, as it assumes past solutions will suit new challenges.

In a complex world, wisdom isn’t just transferred—it needs to be developed in context.

While mentoring offers valuable insights, it often lacks the adaptability needed for today’s evolving landscapes. Without the ability to develop contextual wisdom, mentees risk becoming dependent on outdated perspectives rather than becoming leaders who can think critically for themselves.

It’s like having the wisdom to walk around a giraffe. Otherwise, you’ll think that they have very small, or no, necks!

Mentoring is also like handing someone an old map—but when the terrain keeps shifting, they need a compass. Instead, Contextual Coaching equips individuals with that internal compass, allowing them to navigate uncertainty rather than following pre-drawn routes that no longer apply.

In their book Immunity to Change, Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey highlight that true development requires individuals to shift their sense-making, not just acquire knowledge. Static mentoring models fail to accommodate this vertical development—the kind needed to thrive in complexity.

The Contextual Coaching Approach extends beyond storytelling and giving advice by concentrating on real-time sense-making, adaptive thinking, and engaging with emerging complexity. In contrast to mentoring, which typically looks back, Contextual Coaching fosters the ability to confront the unknown.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin

Steps

1. Shift from advice to inquiry – Instead of giving mentees answers, help them refine the questions they could be asking.
2. Develop sense-making capacity—encourage reflection on patterns, blind spots, and underlying assumptions rather than providing fixed solutions.
3. Encourage real-time learning—create conditions for safe-to-fail experiments where mentees learn by doing and adapting rather than just hearing stories.
4. Integrate multiple perspectives—Instead of one mentor’s viewpoint, expose mentees to diverse experiences and frameworks.
5. Emphasise adaptability over certainty. The best leaders don’t have all the answers, but they have developed the insight and wisdom to navigate uncertainty.

Mentoring has its place, but in a world of complexity, it’s not enough. To grow wise leaders, we must move beyond advice-giving and into contextual development. It’s time to stop handing people maps and start helping them build compasses.

#WisdomInCoaching #ContextualLeadership #BeyondMentoring

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