There is a version of mentorship that looks good on paper. Senior figure. Structured meetings. Carefully dispensed wisdom. The kind HR teams can formally label as mentorship.
And then there is what actually happens.
The comment that stops you mid-thought. The junior colleague whose patience exposes your own impatience. The difficult boss who teaches you, through sheer exhaustion, exactly the kind of leader you never want to become. Most professionals, if they think about it honestly, will admit that the people who shaped them most never had “mentor” in their job title and often had no idea they were doing it at all.
The housekeeping staff member who changed leadership forever
Vinod Rai, Group Head-HR, Shahi Exports
Early in his career, Vinod Rai had a theory about leadership. Enforce the rules. Maintain discipline. Get results. The harder he pushed, the more the theory failed him.
Meetings went badly. Negotiations stalled. The team grew quieter, and not in a good way.
One evening, after a particularly draining day, Rai sat alone in the cafeteria staring at untouched tea. Most employees had left. An elderly housekeeping staff member named Mewalal walked over, smiled, and said: “When the mind is disturbed, tea gets cold faster.” Then he walked away.
Mewalal had worked at the plant for over 25 years. He cleaned corridors and maintained office spaces. Until that evening, Rai had barely noticed him.
Over the following weeks, Mewalal would occasionally stop by. Sometimes with tea. Sometimes with a quiet question about how the day had gone. Gradually, Rai realised the man observed people more carefully than most managers did. He knew which supervisors frightened employees, which workers were struggling silently, and which leaders people genuinely trusted.
Then came the sentence that changed everything.
“You explain rules correctly,” Mewalal told him one afternoon. “But you explain them like rules. People listen better when they feel you understand their problem first.”
The next morning, Rai left his desk and walked to the shop floor. He listened before he spoke. He had conversations instead of issuing instructions. For the first time, the resistance softened.
Years later, despite serving as a global CHRO, Rai still considers Mewalal one of his most formative mentors. The man whose name never appeared on any organisational chart.
The junior who reshaped a leadership style
Raja Varadarajan, Former CHRO, Vistara
Raja Varadarajan says he has had two kinds of unexpected mentors in his career, instructive and cautionary. Both, he believes, were equally useful.
The instructive one was a team member nearly 15 years younger than him. At the time, Varadarajan found himself frustrated by resistance within his team and slipping into an authoritative style he knew was neither sustainable nor effective.
He noticed that his younger colleague handled the same conflicts differently. Instead of asserting his position, he took time to understand each person’s perspective before offering his own. It was slower. It consistently produced better outcomes.
“That completely shifted my thinking,” Varadarajan says. “I started discussing difficult management situations with him and realised how much more effective empathy could be than authority.”
There were no labels. No formal dynamic. Just observation, and the humility to learn from it.
The cautionary mentor came from the opposite direction: a manager who was deeply insecure and exhausting to work with. But the experience forced him to develop resilience, emotional boundaries, and a clearer sense of the leader he wanted to become.
Almost every professional has one such manager in their past. The ones who describe the experience with generosity usually learned something from it that comfort could never have taught them.
Lessons that never came from a leadership workshop
Sujiv Nair, Global CPO, MSn Laboratories
For Sujiv Nair, mentorship was never limited to one defining workplace moment or one influential senior leader. In fact, some of his most meaningful lessons came from people who were never “mentors” in the formal sense at all.
“Unexpected mentors often provide what formal programmes sometimes miss,” he says. “Fresh perspective and unfiltered feedback.”
When asked to reflect on the people who shaped him over the years, Nair found himself thinking far beyond boardrooms and corporate hierarchies.
One of his earliest lessons came from his grandmother — while watching her cook.
“She taught me the importance of staying organised,” he recalls. “Before starting, she would always keep every ingredient in place. I still carry that lesson. Preparation may look small, but it helps deliver consistent outcomes every single time.”
His grandfather, meanwhile, taught him discipline through the simplest everyday habits.
“I still remember how carefully he would wipe and maintain his cycle or scooter every day,” says Nair. “Years later, those vehicles would still look brand new. It taught me that consistency in small things creates long-term excellence.”
Innovation came from his father, who constantly encouraged him to observe the world closely and apply learning creatively to solve problems. That mindset helped Nair win state-level science fair awards for three consecutive years for projects ranging from emergency battery chargers to petrol-saving ignition systems.
Then came lessons from unexpected places within family circles.
“Relatives taught me practical problem-solving skills without even realising it,” he says. One memory that stayed with him involved watching someone repair a broken carved elephant tusk using a simple piece of wood, restoring it so seamlessly that the damage became invisible. “It taught me creativity is often about resourcefulness, not sophistication.”
And then there are his children. “They continuously teach me how to adapt to technology and understand different generations better,” he says with a laugh.
But when Nair reflects on the people who had the deepest impact on his life, one person quietly stands above everyone else.
“Most importantly, my mother,” he says. “She has been the critic and the silent force behind most things.”
Taken together, the lessons may seem ordinary on the surface — organisation, discipline, creativity, listening, dependability. But that is precisely what makes them memorable.
Because the people who shape us most are often not trying to teach us at all. They are simply living their lives in ways that leave something behind for others to carry forward.
The mentors nobody officially calls mentors
Workplaces tend to direct people upward for learning. Towards bosses, CXOs, industry veterans. The assumption is that authority and insight travel together.
Quite often they do not.
Some of the most useful lessons arrive sideways or from below: from a junior colleague who is honest without agenda, a peer who models something worth learning from, or a support staff member who has spent decades quietly observing how people behave when things go wrong.
What these mentors share is that they appear without performance. No formal agenda. No carefully curated philosophy. Just an ordinary moment that changes how someone leads, listens, or sees people.
Growth, it turns out, is rarely hierarchical. The proof is usually standing somewhere nobody thought to look.
Who was the most unexpected mentor in your career?
The person who shaped how you work, lead, or think, without ever officially being called a mentor? Share your story in the comments.