Being An Unintentional Mentor

Lieutenant Colonel Quintillis Lawrence is a member of our sixth cohort of eMMissaries, a five-month leader development program that hand selects leaders to make them better mentors. He is an Army reserve staff judge advocate (i.e., lawyer). His story here is totally relatable given the fact that most of us stumble into mentoring relationship, be it as a mentor or mentee. Read on to see if you can relate.

When thinking about being a mentor, we have all heard that you should wait for someone to ask you to be their mentor. In 1992 the first person I met as I walked into the United States Army Reserve Center on the Lakefront in New Orleans, LA after returning from my Advanced Individual Training turned out to be the person that would become what I call an intentional, unintentional mentor to me, and who still is today. Command Sergeant Major Janice Savage, who at the time was a Staff Sergeant was the Unit Administrator, and as a Reserve Soldier, the Personnel Staff Non-Commissioned Officer (PSNCO). As a newly minted 75B (Personnel Administration Specialist) I would be working for her in the Personnel Administration Center (PAC) as the PAC Clerk.

For the next 10 years or so, I would either work for her in my capacity as a HR professional or in the Finance realm when we both reclassified as 73Cs (Finance Specialists). In that time, I never asked her to be my mentor, nor to help me navigate the Army from a career perspective. Heck, at that time I never even viewed the Army as a career. CSM Savage had a different idea about the soldiers she was charged with leading, and hindsight tells me that it was as a mentor, an intentional, unintentional mentor.

What made CSM Savage a gem of a mentor of the unintentional intentional variety, is her desire to see each and every soldier advance and succeed in their careers, whether it was in the Army or in their civilian careers. One way she mentored the members of the unit was for every promotion board or soldier of the quarter/year board, CSM was the first to mention it to the soldiers that were qualified and also ensured that their packet was completed and ready for submission.

The view I have is 100% hindsight, because at the time I was a young empty vessel, who had no idea what the outcome of my career would be, not that it is over yet. What I saw CSM Savage do was act with intentionality, follow through, and follow up on every soldier that she helped navigate the promotion boards, soldier of the quarter/year, and when it came to making career choices.

Acting with intentionality is where we, amongst other things, know ourselves and our values, are intentional with others, and are responsive to other's needs. CSM Savage was extremely confident in her talents and her knowledge, so she was able to impart that upon us so that we benefited from what she had gained in her experiences. The desire to see success in others was evident by her taking the time out to prepare packets and then sit with each soldier to go over them to ensure that they understood what their chances were in being promoted, and in preparing them for a board. To say that this had a positive effect on us would be the understatement of the year.

Follow through simply means to see a task through its completion. The way my CSM, unknowingly performed this task, or maybe I should say naturally performed it, was by setting timetables for each soldier. This could have been simply by looking at the particular soldier's date of rank and pay entry base date to figure out if and when that soldier was eligible for either an advancement or promotion. From there she ensured that their packet was completed with all necessary information, and anything else that supported the soldier’s chances for promotion in the case of the E-4 and above.

Follow-up according to Websters is “to maintain contact with (a person) so as to monitor the effects of earlier activities or treatments. When taking into consideration all of the actions that people do when mentoring another, it is an absolute necessity to do this in order to ensure that the work that both the mentor and mentee put in, has netted the desired results. What CSM Savage did was to have counseling sessions and group NCO Professional Development (NCOPD) sessions to convey her expectations for us, both collectively and individually. She would show us the fruits of our labor with examples being those soldiers that came before us that have used the “blueprint” she laid out, giving us a birds-eye view of what our future would be.

In years to come, I (we) would be those that she used as an example, which in hindsight, was another show of how she followed up on her mentoring actions. In the end I must now ask... who's your CSM Savage? Are you being a version of CSM Savage for someone too?