Mentoring and Making A Difference

Today’s post is all about mentoring.  I have learned in my professional career and personal life that it is important to have mentors and to be a mentor to others.  A professional mentor is someone who acts as a guiding light in your professional life, offering career advice and helping you through career decisions and navigating the ever more complicated business world.  A personal mentor does the same for your personal life.  Often the two are one and the same.  I have been blessed throughout my life with a host of great mentors, some of whom I would like to discuss today.  I have also been lucky enough to have mentored some truly talented people and they have in turn enriched my personal and professional life.

The first professional mentor I ever had was my fraternity father, David.  David and I knew each other in high school, but we did not become friends until we joined the same fraternity in college.  David was a year older than me, and was chosen to be my “fraternity father.”  During my time in Sigma Phi Epsilon, I saw a great many “father/son” pairings, but none of them developed quite the same bond as David and I.  David and I worked great together.  He would often challenge my young mind, and would question my decisions when they needed questioning.  I cannot say I was a perfect 20-year-old, but I can say that I was blessed by David’s guidance.

The greatest lesson he ever taught me was to ask myself, “would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?”  In other words, would an idealistic young Aaron be proud to know that he grows up into the adult Aaron I am today?  Think about how idealistic we are as children.  We believe our parents know everything.  We believe that there is good in everyone.  We believe that, no matter what, things will work out in the end.  As adults, we know that this is not always the truth, but we should still strive to make the world a place our ten-year-old selves would be proud to live in.  Those words still live with me today.  When a I am faced with a difficult decision, these are often the first words that pop into my head.  “Would the boy I was be proud of the man I am today?”  I can honestly say that yes, a ten-year-old Aaron would be proud of the man a thirty-year-old Aaron has become.  This is the same lesson I will teach my son someday.  When it comes time for him to make difficult decisions, he should act with his conscience, no matter what.  If everyone lived this way, I believe the world would be a far better place.

David and I grew to become best friends.  He asked me to be godfather to both of his sons and he stood by me during my wedding.  He is a lifelong friend.  I truly believe that one of us will carry the others casket at our funeral.  We still talk, less frequently, but always with the same fervent passion that has always permeated our discussions.  Whether the subject is politics, work or our family, David has always been a sounding board for me and I in return to him.  It is not just a friendship, it is a mutual mentoring relationship.

More recently, I found a mentor through work in my immediate manager, Marty.  When I was asked to move into my current position at Spirit, I found out just how difficult a job transition can be.  I was asked to take over the leadership of a team that had been in turmoil, with more than half of the team having transferred out of the group, left the company or been fired in the previous six months.  The group was aimless and needed a strong leader.  The company believed that I was that leader, and asked me to step in.  I did so, despite having no experience in purchasing airplane parts in my previous experience with the company.  Until then, all of my experience had been in non-production roles, purchasing capital equipment or MRO parts (maintenance, repair and operations, for the machinery that does the work in the factory).  The two sides of the company, as I came to learn, are worlds apart.  MRO, while challenging, casts a much wider net over what goes on at Spirit.  It touches all aspects of the business except for what goes on in the Production side.  Despite my experience in buying machinery, contracting services or buying spare parts, I was in for a radical learning curve.

Production buying is one of the fastest-paced jobs in the company, especially on the programs I was assigned to.  We currently build thirty-two Boeing 737 airplanes, two 747’s and seven 777’s each month.  Think about that for a second.  On the 737 program alone we build more than one airplane every single day, each with thousands of parts that must be in stock ready to go.  One missed part can throw the production line off, and can throw our entire schedule into chaos.  Not to sound cliche, but in this job, failure is not an option.  What I did not realize at the time was just how challenging this adjustment would be.

Marty was my manager, but he too was new to his position as manager having just been promoted at the same time I was moved into his group.  I quickly learned that he would be a valuable source of knowledge and found myself in his office every morning with a list of questions to help me through my day.  Marty’s patience in teaching me proved to be the difference-maker in my job and with his guidance, I soon found myself navigating the difficult waters of airplane production.  Within six months of taking the position, I had reached a comfort level from which all my successes have emerged.  My team ended up saving the company a great deal of money last year through a simple inventory analysis that would prove to be the standard going forward.  I owe the ease of my transition to Marty, without whom I would have had a far more difficult time being successful.

As I mentioned before, I too have been lucky enough to mentor several young people in my career and personal life.  One of these is my close friend, Chris.  Chris and I met each other in his first year of college, after he joined Sigma Phi Epsilon.  I had graduated by then, but still remained close to many of the undergrads.  I could tell Chris was a special individual.  His outgoing personality endeared him to many and his savvy business sense showed me that he would be very successful someday.  I found myself stopping by the fraternity to sit and talk with him and we would discuss the chapter, school and his goals.  The mentor/mentee relationship developed further when Chris came to work for Bank of America, where I was working as a Personal Banker at the time.  We would often sit and bounce business ideas off of each other and I helped him develop his sales pitch to potential customers.  Chris took my lessons and excelled.  He was often, if not always, the banking center’s top referral generator.  He saw things in customers that others missed, and developed deep, lasting relationships with his customers that always turned into revenue generating opportunities.  Even after he left BofA to work at another bank, we still talked by phone and email often.  He is now a very successful banker at Commerce Bank in Wichita, and we still talk on a weekly basis.

The last mentoring opportunity I want to discuss today came in 2010 when I became a volunteer at the Tulsa Boys Home.  I was placed with a boy named John* (name changed because he is still underage) who had lived a particularly difficult life.  He had been moved from home to home and was a ward of the State of Oklahoma.  Other than that, John was a typical teenager who played basketball, listened to music and talked about girls.  I met with John once a week and we often played basketball for hours (he whooped me, the kid was 15 and played basketball every single day) or lifted weights.  I imparted some of my weight-lifting knowledge to him and he grew to trust in me and confide in me.  John was, and still is, an incredibly intelligent and gifted young man.  He was well spoken and surprisingly well adjusted considering the difficult background he grew up with.  He actually convinced the people in charge of the TBH to reconsider their policies on mp3 players for the boys.  Until then, they had been forbidden but John put together a presentation on how personal mp3 players could be beneficial to the boys and how the restrictions could be amended to allow them to be used by the boys at the top of their class.  In doing so, he encouraged other boys to work harder so they, too, could have their own mp3 players.  John told me his goal was to someday join the military and become a JAG officer, and I hooked him up with some friends who are military JAG.  After about six months, John was moved to a new home away from Tulsa.  We still keep in touch occasionally, and I look forward to the day we can see each other again.  John was, and is, a very special young man with a bright future ahead of him.

I have been truly blessed to have had some amazing mentors who taught me a great deal throughout the years.  That said, I am often surprised at how much I learn from the young men that I mentor.  The mentor/mentee relationship often turns into a reciprocal relationship with me learning just as much from my mentees as I am teaching them.

If you are a mentor, congratulations.  You have my utmost respect, because this is a truly valuable service you can provide to the people you interact with.  If you are not mentoring someone, find someone to mentor.  You can help make someone a better person and in doing so, can help yourself become a better person.  If you are in need of a mentor, go out and find one.  Don’t wait for someone to offer to mentor you, or for the relationship to develop naturally.  Go out and get it, you will be glad that you did.