Most people assume mentoring means advice. Experience transfer. "Here's what I'd do."
It's an appealing model: it feels efficient; it promises certainty; and it flatters both sides - one person has answers, the other receives them.
But advice often doesn't stick. Or it lands briefly and then evaporates. At its worst, it creates dependency. The mentee leaves with a solution they didn't generate, to a problem they still don't fully understand.
What people are actually asking for
People generally don't come to mentors because they lack answers, but because they're struggling to make sense of a situation.
The signals conflict. The authority is unclear. There's pressure, but no clarity about what would actually help. They're not short on information - they're overwhelmed by it.
They don’t need more input. They need help interpreting the input they already have.
Mentoring as translation
In my work on strategy, I've written about how organisations fail at translation - the breakdown that happens between intent and action, between the boardroom and the backlog. Strategy fails because it's poorly connected to the work that's supposed to deliver it.
Mentoring operates in the same territory, but at a human scale.
This is translation of meaning, perspective, and implication, rather than simply words.
Good mentoring helps someone translate:
- Strategy into action
- Emotion into information
- Noise into signal
- Ambiguity into something they can move with
The mentor isn't there to decide. They're there to help the situation become legible.
Why advice fails (and translation helps)
Advice is context-bound. What worked for me, in my situation, with my constraints, may be useless or actively harmful in yours. Experience doesn't transfer cleanly. The details matter, and the details are always different.
There's also a power dynamic at play. When someone with more experience offers advice, it's hard to refuse. Even when it doesn't fit. Even when something feels off. The relationship makes pushback awkward.
And there's a subtler trap: advice can become a substitute for thinking. It feels like progress - someone told me what to do, so now I know. But knowing what someone else would do is not the same as understanding what you should do.
There's a principle I return to often: never allow information-gathering to get in the way of action-taking. The next time you're in an overthinking loop, ask yourself, “do I really need more information, or do I simply need to act on the information I already have?”
Advice can feed that loop. It offers more information, more perspectives, more options to weigh. Translation does something different. It helps clarify what's already there, so action becomes possible.
Translation preserves agency. It respects local context. It improves judgement rather than replacing it.
What good mentoring looks like
Good mentors ask better questions. They play back what they're hearing. They name assumptions - especially the ones the mentee hasn't noticed they're making. They surface trade-offs rather than hiding them.
They don't say "here's what you should do." They say "here's what I'm noticing - does that match what you're seeing?"
The goal isn't to transfer expertise. It's to improve the mentee's capacity to interpret their own situation; this time, and the next time.
How this connects to leadership
Mentoring as translation mirrors the broader challenge of organisational alignment: strategy translation, execution coherence, and collective sense-making.
In complex organisations, mentoring is often the smallest unit of strategy delivery. It's where abstract direction meets individual reality. It's where someone helps another person connect the work in front of them to the purpose behind it.
When mentoring works well, it builds the same muscle that effective organisations need: the ability to translate between layers, to maintain coherence without enforcing uniformity, to keep intent connected to action.
Advice ends, translation endures
Advice solves for speed. Translation solves for sustainability.
Advice gives someone an answer. Translation gives them a way of finding answers. Not just now, but in the situations that haven't happened yet.
The most useful mentors are the ones who help you see clearly enough that you stop needing to ask.
What would change if you stopped asking "what should I do?" and started asking "what am I not seeing?"
Ady Coles works as a thinking partner and mentor to leaders and teams navigating complexity. His work centres on judgement, perspective, and the often-invisible work of translation — helping people understand their role in the system, make better decisions, and operate with confidence in uncertain environments.