Pull Mentoring
How to maximize your mentoring opportunities over a wider spectrum.
THE BIG WHY — May 2026
Pull Mentoring
The quiet practice that built more engineers than any formal program ever has — and the handful of rules that keep it working
I have never been afraid to ask a question.
Not because I am bold. Because by the time a question leaves my mouth, I have already worked it alone for days. I carry five to ten of them with me at any given time — problems I am turning over in the background while I drive, while I wait in line, while I walk from the parking lot to the front door. When the chance arrives to put one of them in front of a brighter mind than mine, the question is ready. It is narrow. It is articulated. It is the kind of question a senior person can answer in ninety seconds because someone else spent ninety hours shaping it into that size.
I call this pull mentoring, and over thirty-two years across two aviation R&D companies and more programs than I can count, it has produced most of the real education I have received as an engineer. It has never required a formal agreement. It has never required a standing meeting. It has never required the words will you be my mentor.
It has required something else. It has required bravery, preparation, and a specific kind of quiet discipline that nobody teaches and everyone notices.
This is an essay about how it works, why it works, and why the wisdom it produces is the part that makes the whole practice worth doing in the first place.
The practice is for the bold
Let me say this plainly, because it is the part that separates the engineers who build a lifetime of judgment from the engineers who spend thirty years waiting for someone to hand them some.
Pull mentoring is for the bold.
Not brash. Not loud. Not the ones who talk over their peers in meetings or corner senior people at the holiday party. Bold in the older sense — the engineers who are willing to walk up to someone whose intellect intimidates them, hold a specific question in their hand, and ask it cleanly. Most engineers will not do this. Most engineers will see the bright mind walk past and stare at their phone. Most engineers will think I don’t want to bother them and let a career’s worth of compressed judgment evaporate into the hallway air.
The ones who do ask — and ask well — get a completely different career than the ones who do not. They accumulate pattern recognition decades faster. They build a web of professional relationships that runs on respect rather than obligation. They develop, over time, the kind of judgment that other engineers eventually start pulling on themselves.
The first rule of pull mentoring is not a technique. It is a posture. You have to be willing to ask. Everything downstream of that — the rules, the cadence, the discipline — only matters once that first posture is in place.
The pondering does the work
The part nobody teaches about mentoring is that the conversation is not where the thinking happens.
The thinking happens alone. At a desk. On a walk. At three in the morning when a specific detail of a bond-line problem refuses to let you sleep. You turn it over. You test it against what you already know. You find the specific place where your own pattern recognition hits a wall you cannot get past alone. You narrow the question until it fits on one line.
Then you find the brightest mind in the room. And you ask.
What looks like a short exchange from outside is the surfacing of a long solo effort. The senior person is not doing the thinking for you. They are completing a thought you have already carried most of the way. That is a fundamentally different economic relationship than can I pick your brain, and senior people feel the difference instantly. Which is why they answer you when they do not answer others.
The practice is called pull mentoring because the pull — the cognitive labor — has already been done before the conversation ever starts. The ask is not the pull. The preparation is the pull.
Five to ten ponders, always loaded
Off-the-cuff asks rarely produce wisdom.
This is the single most important thing I can hand a younger engineer, and it is the hardest to internalize because it looks like a minor discipline and it is actually the whole game.
You cannot produce a precision question in real time. Nobody can. The idea that you will spot a senior expert in the hallway, think of a brilliant question on the spot, and extract thirty years of compressed judgment from the encounter is a fantasy. What actually happens in those encounters is that you fumble out something vague, they give you a vague answer, you both move on, and a genuinely rare opportunity evaporates into nothing.
The only way pull mentoring works reliably is if the questions are already prepared. I keep five to ten of them loaded at all times — specific work problems I have pondered enough to articulate in one clean sentence. When the bright mind walks past, I do not have to think. I reach for the one that fits their expertise, ask it, and listen.
The five-to-ten number is not arbitrary. Fewer than that and you run out of questions that fit the bright minds who happen to cross your path. More than that and the questions get stale — you start carrying ponders you have not worked in weeks, which means they are not really loaded anymore, they are just sitting there. Five to ten is the working set that stays alive. Each one is being actively pondered between encounters. Each one is ready to fire.
This is the habit. Carry your ponders everywhere. Shape them while you walk. Keep them ready. And when the chance arrives, you do not panic, you do not make small talk, and you do not stare at your phone. You ask your one good question.
The wisdom is the whipped cream on top
Here is the part that makes pull mentoring worth the discipline.
A lot of people in your building can give you the answer to a specific work question. The test procedure. The spec reference. The name of the vendor. The correct formula. Any competent senior engineer can hand you those. If the answer were all you wanted, you would not need to be selective about who you asked. You could ask anyone.
But when you ask the brightest mind in the room — someone with thirty years of pattern recognition compressed into their judgment — something else happens. You ask a narrow technical question, and the answer arrives with wisdom attached.
Let me tell you how I learned this.
Early in my career, I pulled on a department head about metal matrix composites. The question was narrow and specific: what was the first MMC part your team designed and fabricated when the technology was first funded? I had pondered the question for weeks. I had read what I could find. I knew enough to know I did not know the thing I actually needed to know, which was what it had been like inside the first attempt.
The answer was three words. A compressor disk.
And then, because the question was narrow enough that answering it well required the deeper pattern to come along for the ride, I got the next twenty minutes for free. Feeds and speeds. Cutter types. Fixtures they had to invent because nothing off the shelf would hold the ingot the way it needed to be held. The low-resolution X-rays they were squinting at in the early days, trying to read internal geometry that the imaging technology of the time could barely resolve. The specific moment they misread an X-ray and accidentally cut into the fiber-reinforcing region, and the release of residual stress from that cut caused the entire MMC to delaminate uncontained. The part was ruined. But the failure drove the advancement from 2D X-ray to 3D CT scan inspections, and the addition of local gage marks on all future forgings. The failures. The recoveries. The judgment calls that were not in any procedure because no procedure existed yet.
What he handed me was not a machining lecture. It was a lesson in resourcefulness and logic. It was a demonstration of how a small team inventing a new manufacturing process from nothing thinks through problems that have no precedent. Every specific detail he gave me was carrying a general principle inside it — when the data is bad, triangulate. When the tooling does not exist, build the tool first. When the part fails, the failure is the signal, not the setback. None of those principles were stated out loud. All of them were embedded in the story of the compressor disk.
I could not have asked for any of that directly. If I had walked up to him and said tell me how to think about developing new manufacturing processes, I would have gotten hedged generalities. The question would have had nowhere to land. Because I asked something narrow and specific — what was the first part — the answer had to draw on the deeper pattern to be correct. And the deeper pattern came along for the ride.
This is why the practice is called pull mentoring and not pull asking. The wisdom is the whipped cream on top of the answer. It only appears when the question is narrow enough that answering it well requires the deeper pattern to come with it. Ask vaguely and you get nothing extra. Ask precisely and the pattern comes free.
Rarely does the answer to a well-formed pull fail to impart wisdom far beyond the basic answer. That is not a happy accident. That is the whole point of the practice.
The engineers who figure this out stop treating senior colleagues as reference libraries and start treating them as what they actually are — compressed judgment in human form, briefly available, generous when asked correctly, invisible when asked badly. The bright minds in your building are not withholding wisdom from you. They are waiting for someone to ask a question worth spending wisdom on.
Be that someone.
The rules that keep it working
A short list. Each one is a corollary of the core posture — do the pondering first, ask precisely, respect their time, return what you learned. Break them and the door closes quietly and you will not be told why. That is how the system protects itself.
One question per encounter. Never two. Never a cluster. The first ask is the entry fee. The second is where you start being a drain. Leave the rest on the table. Bring them back another day with what you did about the first answer.
Pull in transition spaces. Hallways, elevators, coffee lines, the five minutes before a meeting. Never at their desk. Never by booking their calendar. Never in a bathroom. Pull only in spaces where they have a clean exit in under two minutes. The geometry is what keeps the ask feeling light.
Never ask for supporting data. You asked for judgment. If you then ask them to prove it, you have insulted the gift. Go find the data yourself. Come back next week with what you found.
Never disagree in the session. If the answer sticks out as wrong, break off and ponder it with wider eyes. Most of the time what felt wrong on Tuesday makes sense by Friday, because your brain was missing context their brain had. If it still sticks out after real work, come back with data — never with I disagree. The data does the disagreeing for you, and the relationship survives.
Report back, always. A week or two later: took your steer on the bond line. Here is what I found. You were right about X; Y turned out different — here is why. This single habit is the whole engine. Skip it and the pulls stop working. Senior people tolerate being asked. What they remember is being shown that the answer landed.
Ask about the system, not about yourself. How does this group actually decide what to fund is a pull. Why didn’t I get promoted is a trap. Every personal question has a systems version underneath it that is more useful anyway. Keep the questions about the work and the organization, not about your career.
Pull two levels up, not one across. Your boss’s peers are the wrong altitude — the answers come wrapped in politics you cannot see. Your skip-level, or their peers, can give you judgment without it being a move in a game. And anything that might change your direction gets walked back to your boss as your thinking before you act on it.
Pull often from the people with no titles. Executive assistants, facilities managers, lab techs, the person who runs the shop floor. These people know how the organization actually works — which is usually more useful than knowing how it is supposed to work. Ask respectfully, thank them sincerely, remember their names.
Twenty minutes is the ceiling. Twice a week is an acute phase, not a habit. Any longer and the pull becomes a lecture, which is a different transaction. Any more frequent and you are talking about the work instead of doing it.
What the quiet times are for
Here is the teaching underneath all of this.
The quiet times at work are not empty. They are the negative space where the real organization lives. The meeting rooms produce coordination; the hallways produce thinking. The design reviews produce decisions; the coffee lines produce the judgment that makes decisions good. Engineers who treat the quiet times as downtime between the real work are missing what the real work actually is.
The discipline I am describing is not social. It is cognitive. Carry your ponders everywhere. Shape them while you walk. Keep them ready. And when the chance arrives — when the bright mind steps into the elevator, when the senior engineer pauses at the coffee machine, when the skip-level slows down in the hallway to look at the whiteboard — ask your one good question.
Then listen. Then go do the work. Then come back with what you found.
A lifetime practice, not a career tactic
What I am describing is not a technique for getting ahead. It is a way of continuing to think.
Let me put a number on it. A colleague of mine had one mentor. They met once a week for three years. A formal arrangement, sincere on both sides, the kind of relationship a career development program would hold up as a model.
Over those same three years, I pulled on fifty or sixty people for ten minutes each.
Same time invested. Different education entirely. He got one perspective, deeply. I got fifty or sixty perspectives, each one sharpened to the specific question I had worked hard enough to ask. He learned how one mind thought about a wide range of problems. I learned how a wide range of minds thought about the specific problems I was stuck on. Neither approach is wrong. But they compound into very different engineers over thirty years.
The engineers who practice this well are recognizable late in their careers. They are still asking good questions when their peers have stopped. They are still getting good answers, because the discipline is intact. They have accumulated, across thirty or forty years, a web of compressed judgment borrowed briefly and respectfully from hundreds of bright minds — most of whom they never formally worked for, most of whom would not appear on any résumé, most of whom would shrug if you asked them whether they had mentored anyone.
None of those relationships were mentorships in the formal sense. All of them were mentorships in the sense that actually matters. Every one of them left a fingerprint on the engineer’s judgment.
That is what pull mentoring builds. Not a career. A mind.
The bold and the brave enough to ask are the ones who get to build it. Everyone else waits in the hallway staring at their phone, wondering why the bright minds never seem to teach them anything.
They do teach. You have to ask.
The practice is simple. Carry the ponders. Wait for the moment. Ask the one good question. Listen. Do the work. Come back with what you found. Do it again next week for the next forty years.
The wisdom compounds. The relationships quietly hold. And one day, long after you stopped counting, a younger engineer steps into the elevator beside you with a ready question in their eyes, and you recognize, without anyone having to explain it, exactly what is happening.
You answer.
Herbert Roberts is a licensed Professional Engineer with 32 years in aviation R&D, 62 U.S. patents, and 8 years of forensic engineering consulting serving attorneys on product liability and failure analysis cases. He publishes the Inventor’s Mind series at Substack.