Clint Pulver spent five years working undercover in organizations of all sizes, asking frontline employees what it was actually like to work there. He shared his findings across two episodes of the Head, Heart & Boots podcast (Episodes 26 and 146). His conclusion: the single most consistent predictor of whether employees stay or leave is whether they have a mentor at work — someone who is genuinely invested in their development, not just their output.
The Mentor vs. Manager Distinction
Management is about getting work done. It assigns tasks, tracks performance, and corrects deviation from standard. It is necessary. Mentorship is about developing a person. It invests in what someone is becoming, not just what they’re currently producing. It provides a new framework — new language — for how someone thinks about their work and their potential. In restoration, most leaders are exclusively in manager mode. The companies that retain best are the ones where at least some leaders operate in both.
What Mentorship Looks Like in Practice
Mentorship in a restoration company doesn’t require formal programs. It requires consistent behaviors: asking employees what they’re trying to develop toward (not just how they performed last week), sharing why decisions are made rather than just issuing instructions, connecting good performance explicitly to career advancement rather than leaving the link implicit, and being willing to invest in someone’s growth even when it creates short-term inconvenience (training time, covering their absence at conferences, etc.).
Building a Mentoring Culture
Culture is modeled from the top. If the owner mentors their direct reports, those direct reports are more likely to mentor their crews. If the owner manages exclusively without developing, that behavior propagates down the organization. The restoration companies where field technicians describe feeling invested in are almost always the ones where the owner or senior leadership visibly develops the layer below them — and that behavior is visible to the entire organization.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you mentor employees when you’re extremely busy?
By treating mentoring as embedded in the work rather than separate from it. A five-minute post-job debrief, a question asked in the truck, a brief conversation at the end of a shift — these are mentoring moments that don’t require dedicated time blocks. The consistency matters more than the duration.
What’s the difference between mentoring and doing an employee’s job for them?
Mentoring develops judgment; doing the job for them prevents it. When an employee brings a problem, a mentor asks “what do you think the options are?” before offering a solution. This is slower in the moment but dramatically faster over time — the employee who develops judgment solves their own problems; the one whose problems always get solved for them never does.
Can peer mentoring work in restoration, or does it need to be hierarchical?
Peer mentoring is highly effective in restoration, particularly for technical development and navigating specific customer situations. A crew lead who talks through challenging jobs with a peer learns differently than one who only receives instruction from above. Both channels — peer and hierarchical — contribute to development in different ways.
How do you formalize mentorship without making it feel bureaucratic?
By keeping it light and consistent. A monthly 30-minute conversation with each direct report focused on their development rather than job performance is all the formalization needed. The agenda: what’s going well, what challenge are you working on, what do you need from me? This simple format, held consistently, constitutes mentorship that most employees will describe as the best leadership they’ve experienced.