Who Believed In You?

A vote for intentional mentorship in an impersonal world, and a book you should read

This weekend, I’ve got a scheduled call with my mentor, and I have big news for him. My daughter has chosen a college, and his imprint is all over her decision.

In the spring of 1989, I walked into the office of a professor in his first year at Rhodes College and unbeknownst to me, changed my own life, and maybe my daughter’s life. As a newbie on campus, he had virtually no advisees. I really liked his class and calculated that I might be able to get real attention from someone just starting out. That was one of the luckiest hunches of my life.

I changed my major to Political Science to be in Dr. Daniel Cullen’s department. I took a class from him almost every semester. I went to his house some Sunday nights for dinner. I got to know his wife and kids. I was his house-sitter when he left town. Ten years after we met he came all the way to South Carolina for my wedding. I remember someone’s surprise when finding out one of my college professors was coming to the nuptials and I said “of course – I’ll know him my whole life.” And I have.

Dan and I still correspond regularly. I’ve guest-lectured in his classes. We talk about our families and current events and shared interests, but that’s not all. He sends me things to read. He asks me hard questions and makes me think. In the immortal words of the Commodores, he “builds me up when I’m down.” He’s my friend, and yet he has never stopped teaching me.

Early in my daughter’s college search process she declared the first rule was that she was only going to look at small colleges where she could have a better chance of knowing her professors personally. I wonder where she got that idea?

As we trekked to a dozen campuses to find the right one for my pride and joy, we made a stop at my alma mater, Rhodes College, at her request. She spent the day attending class and hanging out in the cafeteria and library, then at the end of the day, she met Dan and me for a beverage on the patio of the student center. He locked in and engaged her in a conversational Socratic way. He teased out her interest in British literature and in minutes was bantering with her at a critical level on the subject, well out of my depth. I watched her open up intellectually like a tulip under the sunshine of master teaching. It took just one round of craft soda and, for me, local beer, to validate the one must-have she’d set out for her college search. To follow up, he shipped her a book she’d like to read – and the gratitude on her face when she opened the package is something I won’t forget.

You might think this story ends with her choosing to attend my alma mater and heading to Memphis, but it does not. She’s resisting a scholarship offer there to make me pay more at a different school with a better theatre department. But you can be sure she put them through the paces before obligating me to pay their tuition. How? With an hour-long meeting with two theatre professors. This time, in that meeting, she was the one driving the conversation – and she was the one engaging them on common interests. Fifteen steps down the sidewalk after that hour-long meeting, she declared her search was done.

I look forward to telling Dan how and why she has picked Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He won’t be surprised; I’ve been asking his opinions and plying his connections throughout the search. Who else would I ask?

Mentorship is a precious commodity and I’ve learned that people who have strong mentors can better enunciate why they do the things they do professionally, what their goals are, and why they’re correcting prior mistakes.

One of my clients, new Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Dave McCormick, is one of those people. He and his wife Dina McCormick – who like Dave has operated at the highest level of American high finance over a long career that also included a White House tour – have written a great new book about mentorship called “Who Believed In You: How Purposeful Mentorship Changes the World.” The McCormicks profile some of our country’s most successful leaders – from Condi Rice to Hollywood producer Bryan Grazer to many more – and peel back the layers of the mentorship that enabled their climbs.

Graduation season, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day make for a great time to ponder how intentional mentorship matters. I’ll be giving the McCormicks’ book to my daughter and her friends for graduation this spring. Dan will get a copy too - with a note from me, and one from her, too.