What Mentors Are Looking For

So tell me about somebody that you mentored - a mentee - and the impact that you had on this person's life and, you know, what was your objective tell me a little bit about that, Stan.

Yeah, usually, you want to mentor people who are already motivated, you know, you don't want to look and see yourself and create a little Stan McChrystal or a little Keith Krach. What you want to do is find somebody who has potential and interest but could use some additional insights and so I've had the opportunity to work with a number of young officers. There's a system in the military called the aide-de-camp where you have someone who assists you. The purpose is for them to be up close to a senior officer for a year and to get an entirely different view of life, and one of them is now my partner McChrystal group, Chris Fussell, but we would had these long-ranging conversations.

I would make a decision or we would make a hard choice, and he would ask me, “Can you tell me why you chose that, why you did that?” And what he's trying to do is understand the logic trail, and we'd go back and I'd take him through: “Ok, here's what I was thinking, here's what I knew, here's what I didn't know, boom, boom, boom.” Sometimes I'd say, “Chris I don't know if we got it right, but here's what I was trying to do, and here's the interpersonal factors of different people that I was trying to work with, and why I did it that way.” And he was like a sponge. When I watch him pull people together, shape decisions, bring consensus... Well, I think I'm a small part of that. Not a big part, but I think I can take some pride in that.