The mentor I did not know I had.

A notification.

A notification came up on my phone about a month ago. Cliff had reacted to my very first newsletter I posted. I got over 80 reactions on that one, but his got me thinking for longer.

We have not properly spoken in about two years. We tried twice, the way people try, a message about catching up that neither of us followed through on. But I spent almost a year working next to him in Houston, and I have been measuring every project I have run since against that year without ever telling him so.

The strange part is that at the time I did not think it was special. I knew it was good, it felt natural, the way things feel when they are simply working, and I had no idea I was watching something I would not see again.

Arkutun-Dagi.

I met him in our office in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk right before we went offshore, to Arkutun-Dagi, one of the largest offshore platforms in the world, off the coast of Sakhalin. He had joined maybe two months earlier and we were out there together on a site survey. He is from Trinidad and Tobago, worked there for years, then moved to the US. Outgoing in a way that makes you feel heard and at the same time do your best to get things done. Within a few hours he knew everyone’s name, and he was kind and compassionate with all of them.

In November 2019 we both moved to Houston for the FEED on what was going to be a $1.8 billion offshore expansion. For the first two months it was three of us: Cliff, me, and one project engineer. Scope, budget, schedule, risk register, meeting cadence, the reporting line into the client, all the setup work that gets done once and then carries everything after it. Those were probably the most enjoyable two months of project work I have had.

He carried an A4 notebook everywhere. In every meeting it was open in front of him and he wrote, four or five pages a day, sometimes ten. In the evening he would work back through it and send the summary out with clear actions for every meeting he was part of. I thought I was already the structured one, I took notes, I ran a decent action list. Watching him, it became clear that I had been writing things down while he had been building the record the whole project would later run on. I started doing it his way within about a month and I still do it. Though the A4 notebook has been replaced by digital tools.

Then there was what he did in front of the client. A few times the team missed something, and not in a defensible way. He would sit in that meeting and take it, and no name was ever said out loud. Afterwards, in a room with three or four people in it, he would be completely direct about what had gone wrong, and then spend most of the conversation on how we were getting out of it.

He ran performance feedback in a way I had not seen before either. Not just his own view, not just your line manager, he would go and collect it from peers, from people in other disciplines, from the client, and then tell you what came back. I have done it that way with every team since.

None of it was framed as teaching. He never once sat me down. What he did was hand me real authority on real work and then make it obvious he had my back. I knew that if I hit something I could not solve, resources and support would arrive, and I knew that if I was not delivering he would tell me straight to my face and early. Those two things together are why that year was fun rather than heavy despite the long hours and high pressure.

Then March 2020 arrived and the office closed overnight. We moved the whole thing remote and did not lose a day.

Later the oil price collapsed, went negative for a moment, and the client came asking whether cost and schedule could come down, for that phase and for the phases after it. We found it. Very little of that was heroics, it was that the first two months had been done properly and we had a solid basis to show what can be cut and what that would mean.

The bar.

Here is what I did not understand at the time. Working under someone genuinely good does not feel like being taught. It feels like a project going well. There is no moment of insight, nothing to write down, no advice you could repeat to anyone else, which is why almost nobody thanks the person while it is happening.

You find out later, somewhere else, when it stops.

In the years since I have worked in other places and watched plenty of other managers, and slowly the things I had assumed were just how projects get run turned out to be things one person did. I do not think the people I have worked with since are worse at their jobs. They had different defaults, and I had been carrying his without knowing whose they were.

I am on the same side of this, to be clear. I have sat in meetings where the first move after a slip was to establish whose fault it was, and I have not always been the one to stop it. I have been the person who wanted the client to know it was not my scope. Knowing what good looks like and holding it under pressure are two different skills, and he made the first one free for me. The second is still work.

It is also why I do not think you can go out and find a mentor. I never asked him for anything, there was no arrangement and no conversation about my career. If I had gone looking for a mentor in 2019 I would have looked for someone senior to give me advice, and I would have walked straight past the thing that actually changed how I work. I did not arrange to meet him. What I had done was spend four years getting myself onto the projects where people like him turn up, and that is the only part of it anyone controls.

This week.

Work out who yours was. Not the most senior person you have worked for and not the one with the best title, the one whose defaults you are still running, whether you have noticed or not. It might be a manager, it might be a peer, it might be someone who was junior to you.

Then tell them. Not “we should catch up sometime”, because I have sent Cliff that message twice and it went nowhere both times. Tell them the specific thing, the notebook, the meeting where they took the hit and never named anyone, the piece of feedback you did not enjoy at the time and now repeat to your own team.

They almost certainly do not know. People rarely find out what they did for someone, because the person it happened to works it out years later, by which point it feels too late to say it.

It is not too late. I am writing mine this weekend.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

Find me on LinkedIn. You're reading The Next Move — a weekly newsletter by Vitalii Lavelin.
​