A mentor your boss is not

“Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.”

What's a quest without a Yoda to challenge the hero?

"Star Wars" lifted a story line as old as Homer, right down to the sage older adviser for Odysseus, a character named Mentor. For ages since, the stories we tell ourselves about our professional and personal lives leave a role for mentors. Mastery requires finding a master.

Except that Yoda was right. An apprentice is just an apprentice. Yoda had a job to do, training Jedi knights. Eight centuries on he's still at it. Here comes yet another hotshot, young Skywalker. Yoda doesn't need this. When Luke shows up, Yoda thinks, Leia this is not. Yoda plays the fool, toying with this pretty boy who crashed on Dagobah with his pet robot. In the end he agrees to help Luke master the Force. Duty calls.

Mentorship likely will confound me till I reach Yoda's age. In this galaxy, mentors are on bad paper. They mansplain the obvious. Their motives are suspect. They look like Harvey Weinstein. They act like Harvey Weinstein.

And while I've trained a lot of people in a lot of jobs, my work was to teach the ways of journalism or blogging or spreadsheets or databases. A mentor your boss is not. At times I strayed from this mission, though. Once as an editor, I told one of my staffers the way to get ahead faster was to work elsewhere. The staffer left journalism, but not immediately. We're still in touch decades later.

Mastering the mentor game

Was I just a coach, or a mentor? The management training center at Kent State treats coaching as a short-term, task-oriented process. Mentoring takes the long view of inspiration, career development and life choices. Most importantly, mentors don't tell proteges what to do. They know what motivates their proteges, and point them in the right direction. The protege supplies the agenda.

Early in my career, I looked for inspiration to professional society leaders. Cynthia Linton, a Chicago community newspaper editor, called me every month for a progress report. Whatever I was up to, I learned I had better make some progress. Reginald Start, a national correspondent, enlisted me in projects from audit reviews to T-shirt sales, then named me the group's diversity chair. I had a good grasp of what it would take, Stuart said. Sometimes that's all a protege needs to hear.

Building capacity, I was learning, was essential to change. Chicago Tribune project manager Barbara Healy gave me assignments to show me what I still had to learn. Leading by indirection is a classic mentoring method, but Healy didn't consider herself my mentor. As I had learned, mentorship requires a level of candor you can't give the boss. A mentor seemed like a good idea, though, so she lined up another manager to provide a broader perspective, and maybe a sounding board. I tacitly understood when early on this manager left the company, and why I'd need to find my own mentors.

Work coaches, coffee mentors

Leaving newspapers was difficult. But many of my ex-bosses had already done so, and in a sequence of Starbucks meetings they now became my mentors. I was looking for contacts, but was drawn into how they navigated their new environments. Outplacement turned out to be little more than a resume drafting exercise, so I sought out Career Transitions Center, a volunteer job counseling service. Years later I still check in with its coaches.

Over the years, I've followed the advice of friends and peers. Fellow reporters gave me notes on a convention speech, then suggested I get feedback in Toastmasters clubs, a practice I've kept up for decades. Between jobs, I met with fellow job hunters in an accountability group to keep us all on track. When I found someone who really understood and could be frank with me, I married her.

Young Skywalker may have been better off if he listened to Yoda and buckled down. Instead he broke off his studies to rescue Han and Leia. But in "Star Wars" Luke was the hero. Mentors don't call the shots, they're just along for the ride. Proteges choose their own adventure. That's what makes it epic.