Chapter 14
Keep Learning from Your Protégés
by Hollis Heimbouch
I’m fortunate to work in publishing, a field that has long relied on an apprenticeship model of talent management and promotion. Like many of my peers, I began my career as an editorial assistant, reporting to two senior editors. They were responsible for finding and developing new book projects, which seemed to require many fancy meals and trips to glamorous locales. And I was responsible for handling all the sundry details of getting books out the door, which required lots of trips to the photocopier and the mailroom. (We’re talking late 1980s.) A recent college graduate, fresh-faced and naive, I thought I knew a lot about literature—but I knew absolutely nothing about the business of books.
I was mentored well by my two supervisors. They allowed me to sit in on calls with authors, read manuscripts, and contribute feedback. They offered me an unvarnished look into the life of an editor. A few years later I was finally in charge of my own projects and mentoring an editorial assistant of my own—and I learned as much from her as I did from my senior colleagues.
The great thing about working with people who are eager to learn is they aren’t afraid to ask questions. Bone-headed questions, profound questions: Why don’t we just publish best sellers? Why is one author a dream to work with and another the subject of recurring nightmares? How do I edit a book? How do I judge a good jacket design? How do I say no without burning a bridge? How much is a project “worth”?
I tried to be a good mentor, but I can’t lie: At first I resented the amount of time and effort involved, afraid that all the yammering might take me away from “important” editorial work. But the more we talked about what it meant to be an editor and what it was I actually did, the more I came to understand the craft myself. In these conversations, I was able to articulate the mental checklist I used to assess a project’s merits and inherit risks—financial, psychic, and otherwise. I was able to identify a set of communication techniques, a list of dos and don’ts, that had proven helpful in dealing with difficult authors. And I came to see that my work didn’t depend solely on hyper-productivity (the number of projects acquired, the number of best sellers); emotional intelligence and the care and feeding of long-term relationships mattered just as much. Previously these so-called soft skills hadn’t much figured into my daily to-do list, but I now realized they were at the heart of what made some editors great.
My assistant’s almost total lack of inhibition gave me, the smarty-pants senior editor, a second chance to learn critical, intangible aspects of my job: why I did things the way I did and what assumptions were behind my actions. Psychologists call this practice of “thinking about how we think” metacognition, and I would argue it lies at the heart of every productive reverse mentoring relationship, where the teacher learns from the student.
The first time around, as novices, we learn a lot by doing—by making mistakes, by self-correcting, by having our errors pointed out by others. The second time around we learn by teaching someone else to do what we do. That process forces us to be explicit about the embedded rules and mental models we’ve been using to make decisions. It reinforces and clarifies what we know in our guts.
It’s this second-time-around learning that turns good professionals and managers into great ones. While we’re imparting new knowledge and perspectives to our mentees, we’re also gaining deeper insight into what we do. In the best of these relationships, it’s hard to tell the mentee from the mentor, so symbiotic is the learning and exchange.
The trick is not to get hung up by hubris once you feel you’ve “arrived.” Even the most seasoned of us have much to learn not just by looking up the ladder but also by looking down, around, and even outward, to people in other departments or fields. If you get snooty and dismiss unusual suspects from your lineup of potential mentors, you’ll miss out on important guidance and growth. I picked up that lesson the hard way.
As a lifelong runner, I had gotten bored with marathons as I approached my 40th birthday and decided to compete in a triathlon. But I’d never swum competitively, despite having learned basic swimming skills as a kid. So what did I do? I brought the same discipline to swimming that I’d brought to running and, for that matter, editing. I read books, watched videos, and spent several hours a week thrashing through laps on my own and trying to pick up tricks by observing other swimmers. And still I wasn’t getting much better. Stubbornly I completed a few triathlons training this way. But when I examined the race results, my swim times consistently put me in the bottom 20% of overall finishers. How could this happen after I’d worked so hard?
At a loss, I spoke to another triathlete, a much better swimmer than I was. She pointed out that swimming is highly technical, more so than running or cycling; much depends on the physics of body position, stroke, and so forth. I’d read as much in my manuals, of course, and tried to follow the instructions, but something was still missing.
Finally I gave up and hired a swim coach, even though I found it galling to take advice from a brawny guy named Coach Mike, whom I could easily outrun in a 10K road race. In the pool, though, he was Baryshnikov. Together we began breaking down my so-called technique, with Coach Mike showing me how poor form and a bevy of tiny errors had caused me to be inefficient in the water. It was tedious work, often involving my performing idiotic-looking drills as other swimmers sliced the water in adjacent lanes. Coach Mike spoke somewhat mystically about learning to “feel” the water, understanding instinctively how it works with and against your body. The metacognition of swimming, if you will.
Even as I longed to experience that “feel,” I was amazed at how a shift in the position of my hips or a slightly more bent elbow, for instance, resulted in marked and immediate improvements. I was not only swimming faster but also expending less energy doing so. I could never have made these corrections on my own, no matter how much time I spent in the water or how many DVDs I watched. Even today, swimming is still my weakest sport, but I’ve graduated from thrashing to “feeling it”—and perhaps more important, I’m now able to recognize when I’m starting to lose that feel so I can refocus on the fundamentals of good form.
Of course, the larger lesson isn’t about the need to refine technique or even to hire a coach. It’s about how difficult, but necessary, it is to prevent ourselves from becoming atrophied by success and pride. It took me three times longer to become a decent swimmer than it should have because I’d lost the openness and humility that makes learning possible. I’d considered myself proficient in other parts of my life—working, editing, running, being a grown-up in general—and expected the rules I already knew to apply to swimming. I’d brought my ego to the pool, acting with fear and self-consciousness rather than with the inquisitiveness that had served me well early in my professional life.
Mastery can become a closed world; we do only those things that reinforce a positive image of ourselves. By contrast, being a novice can make highly specialized skills seem easy to master: a simple matter of jumping in and flapping around. That’s why it’s so powerful to bring together the intensity of learning-by-doing with the reflection in learning-by-teaching. It’s the reciprocity between the two that leads to satisfaction and growth over the course of a career.
As I head toward my third decade in publishing and my sixth year as a swimmer, I’m trying to stay in close touch with the kids in the world—not just because they can teach me jazzy things about social media and computer games but also because their questions encourage me to keep asking my own.
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Hollis Heimbouch is the vice president and publisher of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins, and a former associate publisher/editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press. She continues to compete in road races and triathlons, creaky joints permitting.