The Mentor I Didn't Know I Needed at 60 - And Why Every Leader Needs One

"There's a quiet myth in leadership circles that once you reach a certain level of accomplishment, the need for mentorship fades. By the time you're leading major initiatives or running large organizations, people assume you've accumulated enough wisdom to rely solely on your own experience. You become the mentor-surely not the mentee. Years ago, by most measures, I had already "arrived." I had run a business school. I understood strategy, operations, culture-building, and fundraising. From the outside, I looked like someone who didn't need guidance."

"But here's the truth most people don't talk about: the higher you rise, the more dangerous it becomes to believe you have nothing left to learn. Experience brings confidence, but it can also quietly narrow your field of vision. It can trap you in what has worked before, causing you to mistake familiarity for mastery. If you're not careful, the very success that brought you here becomes the thing that limits what's possible next. That's exactly when the right mentor can change everything. And when mentorship truly works, both people benefit."

"During my time as dean at the University of Arizona, a colleague suggested I begin meeting regularly with Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. Our meetings weren't in boardrooms or over coffee-they were walking meetings. For an hour at a time, often in the sweltering Tempe heat, we would circle the campus as he talked me through ASU's transformation. We were, quite literally, walking through strategy."

A quiet myth in leadership claims that mentorship becomes unnecessary after achieving high-level positions. Experience builds confidence but can also narrow perspective and encourage reliance on past solutions, creating a risk of mistaking familiarity for mastery. Ongoing mentorship counteracts that narrowing by expanding sightlines and challenging entrenched assumptions, benefiting both mentor and mentee. Practical mentorship can be immersive and context-rich, such as campus walking meetings where a leader explains the purpose and design of interdisciplinary centers, the problems they address, and how they fit within broader institutional strategy. Such engagement turns abstract strategy into visible, actionable understanding.

Read at Entrepreneur