A mentor must always guide, never push. It was my job to listen to them, offer my perspective, and encourage them to pursue the ideals they believed to be true.
Dictators lead through fear; good coaches do not.
I try to not to step on any coach's toes as far as what I'm telling the young guys or what I'm trying to give them.
A leader is a coach, not a judge.
This is what an excellent teacher does; he does not follow his disciples' fancy everywhere, but leads them to his own mind, and pulls up the thorns, and then puts the seed in, and does not answer at once in all cases to the questions put to him.
What it comes down to, I believe, is that mentoring often involves telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. When you are able to be humbly honest with someone about a situation with which you have personal experience-even if you risk angering or hurting that person-you are offering the most valuable gift of all.
I've had to learn kind of sense when the questions would be coming and be ready to handle them. There's a lot of education and reiteration that happens on these online channels and sometimes it's tempting to just say, "Well, just go and read the documentation," but you know, people appreciate being led along and taught and mentored.
Remember that mentor leadership is all about serving.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
