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Mentorship and Talent

Identifying capability early, developing it deliberately, and transferring the judgment that cannot be written into a manual.

Chapter contents

Entries filed directly to this chapter

  1. 01

    Letting Someone Fail Safely

    A person who has never been wrong in your presence has not been tested. The work is engineering the conditions under which being wrong is instructive rather than disqualifying.

  2. 02

    The Stretch Assignment

    Real responsibility with real consequences, sized so that failure is survivable. Most development assignments fail because the leader retains the decisions and hands over only the work.

  3. 03

    Spotting Capability Before It Is Proven

    The signals that precede a record are behavioural and observable. The proxies most organizations use — polish, confidence, credentials, visibility — measure something else entirely.

  4. 04

    Mentorship, Sponsorship, Coaching, Networking

    Sponsorship is what moves careers and it is the one nobody asks for, because asking requires naming what you want from somebody who would have to spend standing to provide it.

  5. 05

    What Mentorship Is For

    Judgment is the thing being transferred, and it is the one thing that cannot be taught directly. Everything in this chapter follows from that constraint.