How to Fasttrack Your Success With Mentoring with Dr Ruth Gotian
Dr Ruth Gotian - Associate Professor, Author and Mentorship Expert
Dr. Ruth Gotian, Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anaesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, is a globally recognized expert in mentorship and leadership development.
A semi-finalist for Forbes 50 Over 50, Dr. Gotian is a prolific contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Psychology Today, where she shares insights on 'optimizing success.'
With a focus on the mindset and skill set of peak performers, including Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, Olympic and NBA champions, she’s also the award-winning author of The Success Factor and The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring.
How successful could you become with the right mentors in your corner?
In this episode, Dr Ruth Gotian shares with us the power of mentoring to drive success. We learn how mentoring can transform your mindset and shift your perspective on what success can look like for you, and how to go about making your dream a reality.
We’ll learn how to build amazing mentoring relationships as mentor or mentee – and the 6 words that changed Dr Gotian’s outlook on success and what it takes to get us there.
Hailed by Nature, Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University, Dr Ruth Gotian was named a top 20 mentor worldwide. Thinkers50 ranked her as the #1 emerging management thinker in 2021, and in 2024, a top 50 executive coach in the world. LinkedIn recognized her as a top voice in mentoring. With a focus on the mindset and skill set of peak performers, including Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, Olympic and NBA champions, she's also an award-winning author of The Success Factor and the Financial Times Guide to Mentoring. She is also the only author who had her work turned into a theme-song, titled “I’m Possible”.
Learn more about Dr Ruth Gotian and find her book here:
Get your copy of Dr Ruth Gotian’s latest book The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring.
Episode Transcript:
Important Chapters in this episode:
00:00 Introduction to We Are Human Leaders
01:34 Meet Dr. Ruth Gotian: A Journey to Success
04:05 The Power of Mentoring
04:22 Defining Mentoring vs. Coaching
06:03 Building a Mentoring Team
11:54 The Importance of Mentoring in the Workplace
13:03 Measuring Mentorship Success
15:45 Tips for Mentees and Mentors
20:03 Real-Life Mentoring Stories
24:06 The Impact of Mentoring on Personal Growth
27:12 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
[00:00:00] Sally Clarke: Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. What does it take to unlock true success, the kind you didn't even know you were capable of? Our guest today has studied in depth what sets apart those people who achieve peak performance. And her global research showed that essential to this success, irrespective of their field, He's great mentoring.
[00:00:29] I'm Sally Clark. And today, Alexis Zahner and I are speaking to Dr. Ruth Gotian about the power of mentoring to drive success. We learn how mentoring can transform your mindset and shift your perspective on what success can look like for you and how to go about making your dreams a reality. We learned how to build amazing mentoring relationships as a mentor or mentee, and the six words that changed Dr.
[00:00:52] Gottschall's outlook on success and what it takes to get us there. Dr. Ruth Gottschall is Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a globally recognized expert in mentorship and leadership development. She was named a top 50 executive coach in the world in 2024.
[00:01:12] And with a focus on the mindset and skillset of peak performers, including Nobel prize winners, astronauts, Olympic and NBA champions, she's also the award winning author of The Success Factor and The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring. Let's delve in.
[00:01:29] Alexis Zahner: Welcome to We Are Human Leaders, Ruth. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today. Bye bye. And we'd love to begin by getting to know you a little bit better first and the journey that has brought you to the important work that you're doing now.
[00:01:43] Dr Ruth Gotian: Sure. Well, first of all, greetings from the blistering cold New York City.
[00:01:48] I know you guys have summer, but for some of us on the other side of the world, it is freezing. I am Dr. Ruth Gotti, and I am a social scientist who studies extreme high achievers. So think Nobel Prize winners and astronauts and Olympians, NFL, hall of Famers, fortune 500 CEOs, NBA Champions. I am obsessed with success.
[00:02:10] I want to know how people get it and how the rest of us can improve our own success. So I went about studying these people. It's a work that will outlive me. There are always more successful people who I can interview and. I figured out what has made them so successful, and then I reversed engineered their path, created a blueprint, go all over the world teaching it.
[00:02:32] And this is while also being a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medicine, where I'm also chief learning officer.
[00:02:38] Sally Clarke: I'm so curious to know, Ruth, what drove this fixation with success?
[00:02:43] Dr Ruth Gotian: Well, you know, I'm in New York. We're surrounded by incredibly successful people, and I would see them all around me. And I said, you know, we have these extremes.
[00:02:54] We have these really successful people, and we have the people who are really struggling. And I really wanted to figure out what is it that they know that I haven't figured out yet, and who do they know that I don't know? So this became this, just, obsession to understand this, so I've always been super curious about it.
[00:03:15] I also used to run an MD PhD program where students would get both degrees, and even in that program that only has a three and a half percent acceptance rate, these are like the creme de la creme, there were still those who would rise to the top. So I realized even within that successful pool, there were people who really understood and got it.
[00:03:39] So at the age of 43, while working full time and raising three kids and having elder care for my parents, I said, let's add one more thing to the to do list, and I went back to school and got my doctorate and really took a deep dive into this. And hundreds of keynotes, multiple books later, here we are, and
[00:04:03] Sally Clarke: here we are.
[00:04:05] And one of the really interesting things for me about your work is that one of the really key components that's risen to the surface in terms of driving success is mentorship. And we are so fascinated to unpack this topic with you today. And I'd love to start firstly, by really understanding from you.
[00:04:22] How do you define mentoring and how does this differ from things like perhaps coaching?
[00:04:26] Dr Ruth Gotian: Sure. So, one of the reasons that I pulled on that thread of mentoring was all the successful people surrounded themselves, not with one mentor, but with a team of mentors, which is why the first book is called The Success Factor.
[00:04:41] It's about the four elements of success. The latest book is The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, which really takes a deep dive into that. A mentor is your guide by your side, somebody who is able to see a path you may not see for yourself, and they could open doors you might not have even known existed.
[00:05:02] They can tell you about opportunities that weren't even on your radar. They are there for the long term. They are usually at least in North America, they are not paid and they're really with you for many years. A coach is different. A coach holds up that mirror. They are your accountability partner. They are the ones who said, you wanted to do this.
[00:05:26] We talked about how to do it. What do you think is stopping you from doing this right now? Right? So it's really, really pushing you outside of your comfort zone with an accountability, but it's also for a more finite period of time where the mentor could be with you for years and years. Usually coaching engagements are within six month cycles and they don't meet with you as often.
[00:05:50] Now, the. Where mentors do not get paid, I said, at least in North America, the executive coaches do get paid and the good ones get paid well. So it's really quite different. Now I would add another layer or the sponsors. The sponsors are the ones who create opportunity and talk about you in a good way in rooms you may not be in.
[00:06:14] So they are the ones who are putting you forward for promotions. They are the ones who are recommending you for choice awards. Committees, projects, they are announcing on social media when you have achieved something, thereby throwing their name and reputation so that everyone who follows them can see that they are in support of you.
[00:06:36] So all these types of people are people you should have in your support team.
[00:06:40] Alexis Zahner: Thank you so much for that, Ruiz. And in the very first chapter of your book, you mentioned that those with mentors outperform and out earn those with those who don't. Have mentors, and you also mentioned that 76% of people believe they should have a mentor, yet only about 37% of us do.
[00:06:58] Why does this discrepancy exist?
[00:07:02] Dr Ruth Gotian: Let's start with the first part. The first part is, yes, there's over a quarter century of research that says that those who have mentors out or an outperform, those who do not have mentors, they produce more, they're more innovative, they're more curious. They publish more, they have higher self efficacy, lower rates of burnout, and those with mentors are five times more likely to get promoted.
[00:07:27] By the way, fun fact, their mentors are six times more likely to get promoted. Now we have been talking about this. Almost every single Fortune 500 company has a mentoring program. So 76 percent of people, as you said, understand the benefits. They've heard this. They've read my book. They've heard the keynotes.
[00:07:45] They've. I read all the stats online, but yet just a little over a third actually have them. And there are a few reasons why that could be. One, they might be searching for the perfect mentor. Newsflash, perfect mentor doesn't exist. Nobody's perfect. Not you, not me. Right? Second, they're looking for someone who's exactly like them.
[00:08:06] Cause they said that person will get me. Newsflash, that person doesn't exist. You are never going to find someone from the same cultural background, religious background, socioeconomic background, educational background, who faced the same hurdles, that person doesn't exist either. So by waiting for that same person, you're letting time go by.
[00:08:26] You are letting your career go by. That's why a mentoring team is so effective. You can create your version of perfect. Now, other people might have had a bad mentor, what I call a tormentor. Now, these tormentors, which could be its own episode, are the people who might take credit for your work. Or they might not want you to collaborate with other people because of their own low self confidence, or they'll give you low yield projects that really will not help your career at all, or there's too busy to even connect with you.
[00:09:09] They say that they want to mentor, but they're never around. They don't seem to really want to do it. If you've had the really toxic mentors, those really toxic tormentors who maybe are even screaming at you instead of helping you, you are so burned that you don't want to dip your toe in that mentoring pool again.
[00:09:28] And that's a shame because as I previously mentioned, those who have mentors out earn and outperform those who don't. So I say that bad mentors are worse than no mentors. Hmm. Super
[00:09:44] Sally Clarke: important insight there, Ruth. And I love that you also elucidate that we really can look to have a team of mentors that are kind of meeting different needs that we have.
[00:09:54] We are multifaceted. We have these different aspects of ourselves going on. And I think that then also takes the pressure off trying to find the one perfect mentor or the one person who is some kind of 10 year older version of myself, who's had the exact same trajectory. So, and I really liked that kind of almost an entourage of support that I know, obviously a lot of very successful people.
[00:10:15] You know, almost inherently have around them, but that's something that's actually accessible to everyone.
[00:10:20] Dr Ruth Gotian: Yes. I recommend that you have three layers of people on your mentoring team. You definitely want the people who are senior to you. They have the vision. They've been there. You also want people who are at your level, what I call friend tours.
[00:10:32] They have the emotional capacity to connect with you because they're at that same level. They know what you are going through. You also want people who are junior to you, what we now call reverse mentors. This was actually started in the nineties at GE when Jack Welch, the CEO, had the junior employees teach the senior executives about the internet.
[00:10:52] The senior executives weren't getting it, but the junior employees understood it. So we can learn so much from those who are younger than us. I would also add retirees. Because retirees have the time, they have the willingness to pay it forward. This is their legacy and they are not tethered to anyone or any organization.
[00:11:15] So they will tell you who will have your back and who will stab you in the back. And if any of the listeners want to learn how to form a mentoring team, obviously it's in both books. I talk about it. They can also go right on my website at ruthgotian. com forward slash mentoring team as one word. And there's actually a worksheet that teaches them exactly how to do it.
[00:11:39] Amazing.
[00:11:41] Sally Clarke: And you've just alluded to, you know, an incredible company where mentoring has obviously been really embedded in how they do things. And I love this reverse mentoring concept as well. And also, you know, embracing the wisdom of retirees. Why is mentoring so important in the workplace? And I do want to say some of our listeners are in big companies where there will be a very robust mentoring program, but there's, there'll also be listeners for whom that's not the case.
[00:12:05] Can you share with us why this is so important to our experience in our careers?
[00:12:11] Dr Ruth Gotian: Do you know the average length of employment of someone today, of Gen Z? Great question. It's two years. Two years. Yeah. Makes sense. Two years. Do you know what it's like for someone who has a mentor? Maybe five. Five years. So this turns out to be the best retention tool out there.
[00:12:31] And we all know that it's very expensive to replace and train a new employee. This becomes the best tool out there. It also becomes a fantastic tool for internal mobility and we are not leveraging the best tools we have, which who are people, right? We train them, we work with them, we should promote them.
[00:12:55] And then this really helps to retain them as well, which. Ultimately, helps the bottom line of the organization.
[00:13:02] Alexis Zahner: Love that Ruth. And what are some of the objective measures of mentorship? How can we actually know if our mentorship relationship is successful?
[00:13:12] Dr Ruth Gotian: So there are a few ways to do that. And I will say that there are certain things that are obvious and certain things that are not obvious, right?
[00:13:19] We always start with identifying what would success look like, and it's going to be different for every person for one person is I want to get promoted. Another person is I want to throw my hat in the ring, so just having it's hard to measure self confidence. But if I can measure things that they're doing in six months from now that they weren't doing before, and they are more likely to throw their hat into the ring, that is a measure of success.
[00:13:48] So obviously, we can look at retention, we can look at promotion, we could look at recruitment, are they bringing their friends in, right? This is all part of it. But we also need to look at the intangibles of What I call their power skills, right? What is their self awareness like? What is their self confidence like?
[00:14:07] How are they able to work with other people? These are things that are much harder to measure. Those who have mentors are able to grow in that capacity significantly.
[00:14:18] Alexis Zahner: That's such a good insight, Ruth. And what I like about it so much is that I feel that there's this element there where as the mentee.
[00:14:26] You're illuminating some of the blind spots to your success that perhaps you might not be aware of, conscious of, cause you can't always see them in yourself. And, you know, we know that as leaders become more senior in organizations, often they become less open to things like feedback and therefore perhaps keeping themselves stuck or success just beyond reach.
[00:14:47] Because of this. Yeah.
[00:14:49] Dr Ruth Gotian: So, I don't even use the word feedback because it causes people to get so defensive. I instead like to think like athletes. The elite athletes crave the feedback, but they see it as an opportunity for enhancement. So I ask someone when I'm mentoring them, I say, do you want ideas on how to make this better?
[00:15:10] On how to make this bigger? On how to make this more impactful? You see, just by changing that word from feedback to ideas, how now all of a sudden you're excited. Yes, tell me, tell me
[00:15:21] Sally Clarke: more. You're leaning in. Exactly. Amazing. And to that end, I'm really curious about how, as mentors in both licks, and I have experience of being a mentor, I like to think of myself as kind of the, I've had an unusual career path.
[00:15:36] I'm someone that I think I can help, you know, students that I mentor, for example, see that there are different ways of achieving success and that can look different for different people. Um, Yeah. What are the things that we can do as mentors to really bolster that relationship and to ensure that the mentee is getting the absolute most out of it?
[00:15:53] Dr Ruth Gotian: So I think those meetings are critical. Look, I am not a very formal person when it comes to this. I don't think we have to meet every other Tuesday with an agreement and an agenda. And, you know, what if I have a question on Thursday, do I have to wait 12 days before I can ask this question? But I think there are a few things you can do to really bolster this relationship.
[00:16:14] If we're going to have a meeting, we don't need to discuss five things. We discuss one or two things. It doesn't need to be an hour. It can be 20 minutes. Let me get this question answered now. Let me get enough of a push that I can work with this. Help me uncover. But I need to let you know, as the mentee, what I am working on.
[00:16:34] What I could use some help with and how much time I think it'll take. And if I don't do that, we're sitting and talking for an hour or eating for an hour. And nothing was really accomplished. But if I can tell you in advance what we're going to work on, what I need help with, how much time I need, that also lets you prepare some ideas and maybe you're not the expert on that topic.
[00:16:56] So you can start thinking about who else I should speak with so that you can start. Making that connection for the mentee, it's the mentee that drives this relationship. An important
[00:17:07] Alexis Zahner: point, Ruth, and I love this idea of really taking stock of where we're at as a mentee. So we can really come to this from a goal orientated place.
[00:17:16] Are there other ideas that you have for mentees that can really help them get the most from their mentorship experience?
[00:17:24] Dr Ruth Gotian: Yeah, I think that follow up is key. So, very often people go into a mentoring meeting, they get some ideas on how to improve, and then they don't circle back. Well, did you use that guidance?
[00:17:36] Did you not use that guidance? Did you just waste my time? But if I circle back and say, thank you so much for this guidance, and this can be an email by the way, or a text message, I implemented A, B, C, D, I tried, but it didn't work. I did not do E because, and you give a reason. And the reason you want to do that is you say, I have considered everything that you've said.
[00:17:59] This is what I think will work because, this is what I think will not work because. So it really shows that you value that guidance. Otherwise, it just goes into a vacuum and we just wasted each other's time. Right? You just wanted somebody who will support your ideas. But really what you want from a mentor is somebody who will push you outside of your comfort zone because that is where the learning occurs.
[00:18:26] Sally Clarke: So beautifully put, Ruth. That is where the learning occurs, outside the comfort zone. And I think also what I'm hearing is it really creates this, it's more of a dialogue because I think sometimes we have this idea that the mentor is this wise person on the hill who knows everything. And the mentee is simply.
[00:18:40] Taking in the information and implementing it, but it becomes more of an integrated experience for both parties. And certainly in my experience, when I get a little bit of pushback as a mentor, that's when magic occurs. That's when I'm like, Oh yeah, like now I'm learning too. And that's
[00:18:55] Dr Ruth Gotian: such a beautiful experience.
[00:18:56] Exactly. You know, one of the people who I interviewed Lefkowitz, goes by Bob, and he won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2012. And he shared it. With his mentee, right? Because it's not one person who wins a Nobel prize in chemistry. It's usually two or three. So this was three people. And one of the people was his mentee.
[00:19:18] And I said, Bob, was it strange to share the Nobel prize with your mentee? Was the generation younger than you? He said, strange. He said, that's a notch on my belt. That's how I measure my success by the success of my mentee. So I said, well, how do you know if someone's going to be successful, right? Half of Nobel prize winners, by the way, were trained by other Nobel prize winners.
[00:19:41] And he said, look, when we come up with the project, the mentee has to be excited by the project, and I, as the mentor, have to be excited by the project. If we're not both excited by it, it's not going to work. And I think he's got a good sense. He has mentored over 350 people at this point.
[00:20:02] Sally Clarke: Amazing. I would love to hear also, you know, do you have some examples because we've talked really beautifully I think about some of the theory and some of the ideas around mentoring, how we can improve our experience from both sides.
[00:20:13] Do you have any stories that stand out to you as really glorious examples of a mentoring relationship?
[00:20:19] Dr Ruth Gotian: Well, I think that was one of them was Dr. Bob Lefkowitz. And I think that is a. Great example. Another one I will share, one of the stories that I share in my keynote about mentoring is about my former mentee, Brianna.
[00:20:36] We connected over our very curly hair, right? Curly girls always find each other and we, right away, we start talking about what products we use and how do you control the frizz and things like that. And then about fast forward about a year later, we happened to be at the same conference, I was delivering a workshop and she was there and I was watching how she would push ideas and how she would also listen simultaneously.
[00:21:04] Afterwards, we had a Slack channel for the conference attendees, and everyone shared their ideas of how they will implement these ideas. And it turns out that she curated all this data that she found on the internet. And I said, Brianna, this would make a great article. And she said, Oh, I've never published.
[00:21:23] I don't know how to do that. And I said, I have, let's work through this. So we work together side by side. My rule is with my mentees, if they write the first draft, they're the first author, which for academics is a huge deal. Well, she wrote the first draft. She was first author. It was a major journal. And this was her first publication ever.
[00:21:46] Now she has since gone on, she has published in every major journal. But here's what happened after it was published. I said, Brianna, we need to go a step further. We need to create what's called a visual abstract and a video abstract. These are summaries because people take it and process information differently.
[00:22:05] Summaries of the article and the main points. I explained to her what a visual abstract would look like, she did it, and I said, Oh, these are colors. I've never seen them in these colors. Why did you choose these colors? She said, Because most people who are colorblind are colorblind in these colors, whatever they are.
[00:22:24] But if they are colorblind, most of them can see these two colors. This would not have even occurred to me to consider. So I was able to learn from her and we were able to reach a lot more people who didn't have to look at different shades of gray because she thought about this. Now the second thing was the video abstract where we created a one or two minute video about the article and she went to post it on social media and it was on I think one and a half speed.
[00:22:55] And I said, Brianna, we sound like daffy duck. I mean, this is ridiculous. It sounds crazy. And she said, no, no, no, Gen Z, this is how we listen to videos. Well, I didn't know this. I listened to books in the car on 1X. I asked my sons and they said, yes, of course it's one and a half X. That's how we listen to everything.
[00:23:16] Would not have occurred to me. So she taught me that reverse mentoring. I was able to teach her about reaching people in different styles and how to publish. And how to then amplify the article. And she taught me these things about being inclusive to a group that was not on my radar and how this next generation listens to information.
[00:23:40] Alexis Zahner: Such important insights, Bruce, and ones that seem to sit perhaps outside what we would think to be fundamentally part of that mentoring journey. This is really about shifting perspective, shifting lived experience. It's almost like a money can't buy kind of experience, if you will. There are the kinds of things you can't gain through paying for a coach.
[00:24:00] It's something you have to walk with people to experience. So I really love that that was what you took out of it.
[00:24:06] Dr Ruth Gotian: You know, I'll share six words that changed my life. I mentioned that I went back to school at the age of 43. I knew I was going to study success and my mentor approached me and I told him what I was going to do and study.
[00:24:22] And he said, six words. Do something important, not just interesting. And whenever I signed copies of the Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, those are the six words I put in. With those six words, without telling me what to do, he got me thinking differently, so instead of doing a one institutional pilot study, my research became a global study.
[00:24:47] And because it was a global study, it got so much press, it got all those articles, it got to the book, The Success Factor. All because of those six words.
[00:24:57] Sally Clarke: Do something important, not just interesting. For me, that just takes me into a space of courage, of vulnerability. I'm curious what that impact was for you.
[00:25:06] How did that transform your experience of going back to school at 43?
[00:25:11] Dr Ruth Gotian: Well, going back to school at 43, what I did before that was I actually took some online courses. Because there was no online when I got my first two degrees. It didn't exist, so I was like, uh, can I, like, what is this? Like, can I submit papers online?
[00:25:29] Like, how does this work? So I wanted to see if I could do it, and I took some classes. I was older than some of my professors, but I did realize that by going back later in life, I had the perspective of experience. That I could then put into my work, I knew how to manage time better than anyone else. So when someone who was a full time student without any responsibilities would tell me that they're feeling overwhelmed by everything they have to do, I would say, girl, I work full time, commute an hour and a half each way, have three little kids, a husband and two parents I'm taking care of.
[00:26:08] Don't tell me you're overwhelmed. Get the project done. And I had to have some of those conversations sometimes with people, but I think that it can get done. It also gave me, as you said, courage because I was studying success and I was calling up Nobel Prize winners and I was calling up these types of people.
[00:26:31] To get them to talk about things they've never spoken about before. I had to get them to agree to be extremely vulnerable to talk about things that I couldn't Google about them. And they were all willing to do it.
[00:26:44] Alexis Zahner: For me, a word that comes to mind there as well, Ruth, is audacity. And I really love that about your story.
[00:26:49] It's just having the courage to step up and be audacious, even when you're really uncomfortable. And it sounds like it's paid dividends. And as an aside, I also do remember having to run down hallways of universities to get the timestamp of a lecture of a paper that was due by a certain period of time.
[00:27:05] So I hear you're paying there. Now Ruth, we could chat about this quite literally all day. Your insight has been amazing and we would love if you could leave us with a parting piece of wisdom for our listeners. Why do you think mentoring is so important to an individual's success?
[00:27:24] Dr Ruth Gotian: I think it gets you to think bigger.
[00:27:27] Mentoring gets you to think in ways you have blinders on. You can't think that way. So the mentoring takes those blinders off, pushes you in ways that you did not even know that you could be pushed. And just when you think you're going to break, it shows you what else you can do. And then you become like a rubber band.
[00:27:49] Once you've gone there and you've stretched that way, you can no longer go back to your original form. You are now stretched. And guess what? The next time, you're going to stretch further. That's what mentoring can do for you.
[00:28:04] Sally Clarke: Such inspiring words, Ruth. I think you've inspired both Lex and I to also think about our mentoring sort of entourage, and I'm sure every listener is contemplating these things right now too.
[00:28:14] So for everyone, I think, you know, however we define success, mentoring can play such a key role. In following that journey in that path, Ruth, we, Lesley Lakes alluded to this conversation could go on for hours. We are so grateful for your time, for your research, and for your presence here today on We Are Human Leaders.
[00:28:32] Thank you so much for being with us. Thanks for having me.
[00:28:41] Thanks for joining us for this conversation with Dr. Ruth Gotian. If you'd like to learn more about her work, you can find links in the show notes and to learn more about human leaders, go to www. wearehumanleaders. com. Thanks again for being a part of the conversation. We'll see you next time.