The Best Mentors Discover You. They Don't Clone Themselves.

I speak at many universities, and after one of those talks a student pulled me aside. He started with "Mr. Llopis," and I asked him to call me Glenn. Then he asked me a question I have never forgotten.

"Why is it that I'm being mentored by people who are telling me to be more like them, rather than a mentor who is trying to find out what makes me different, so I can bring value into a room that perhaps somebody never did?"

It's one of the most important questions a young person can ask. And it's one every mentor, manager and leader should be asking themselves. Because the answer reveals whether we are developing people or simply reproducing ourselves.

The Limitations of Sameness

Most of us were taught to be like everybody else so that we could fit in the room. Mentoring often reinforces that lesson. A well-meaning mentor shares the path that worked for them and encourages the mentee to follow it. The advice is sincere. But the effect is replication.

We have learned the limitations of sameness. When everyone in the room has been shaped by the same path, the room stops asking new questions. It solves today's problems with yesterday's answers. And the people who could have seen something different learn to edit themselves down instead.

The same instinct shapes how we hire. As I've written, when leaders hire people who think like them, they limit what their organization can see. Mentoring for sameness does the same thing, one relationship at a time.

Young People Are Asking for Something Different

The appetite for real mentorship is enormous, and so is the gap. A 2025 Harris Poll survey conducted with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America found that 74% of Americans ages 18 to 25 lack access to meaningful career mentorship. Only 41% feel confident navigating the job market. Yet 84% believe mentorship opens doors to possibilities they can't yet see.

Read that last number again. Young people aren't asking to be told which door to walk through. They're asking for help seeing doors they didn't know existed. That can only happen when a mentor takes the time to understand who they are: how they naturally think, what fuels them and what they notice that others miss. Without that understanding, even the most generous advice becomes a set of instructions for living someone else's career.

Difference Is the Whole Point

To every young person who feels a little different from the people around them: know that this is the whole point. Your ability to unleash what is different about you is what has the most value today.

Everyone is looking for answers right now. When you know how you are different, you have a kind of wisdom that experience alone can't provide. You can ask questions the more experienced people in the room may no longer be conditioned to ask. That is not a gap in your development. It is your contribution.

This is a big part of how the next generation wants to be led. They want to be seen as individuals, not shaped into copies.

Mentoring Now Runs Both Ways

The most effective mentoring today is mutual. Randstad's Workmonitor 2026 found that 78% of workers learn soft skills from older colleagues, while 72% learn technology and AI skills from Gen Z and millennial colleagues.

That tells us something about what mentoring has become. It is no longer a one-way transfer from the experienced to the inexperienced. It is an exchange between people who bring different things. A mentor who expects to learn is far more likely to discover what makes a mentee different, because they are paying attention to it.

How to Mentor for Discovery

Whether you are a senior executive or a first-time manager, you can mentor this way starting now.

Ask before you advise. Before sharing what worked for you, ask what they notice that others seem to miss. Their answer will tell you where their difference lives.

Look for the contrarian idea. When a mentee offers a view that challenges the norm, resist the urge to correct it. Explore it. It may be the most valuable thing they bring.

Share your story as context, not a template. Your path is useful information. It is not a map for someone else's life.

Name what you learned. Tell your mentee what they taught you. It signals that their difference has value, and it models the reciprocity that makes mentoring work.

The Question Behind the Question

That student wasn't really asking about mentoring. He was asking whether the world had room for who he actually was. The best mentors answer that question with a clear yes, and then they help you prove it.

The goal of mentoring is not to reproduce yourself. It is to help someone else become unmistakably themselves.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.