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Posted: Wed 2nd Sep 2026
Last updated: Wed 2nd Sep 2026
7 min read
Earlier this year, I completed 10 mentoring sessions with Kevin Watt, managing director of Aberdeen-based company KCI.
Kevin's business specialises in leak sealing for the global energy industry, where technical judgement and trust carry real weight.
We worked together through the Help to Grow: Management Course, delivered in partnership with Aberdeen Business School at Robert Gordon University.
The sessions also formed part of my ILM Level 7 qualification in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, so my work included contracting, reflective practice and supervision.
Most of what stayed with me, though, came from the conversations themselves.
They showed me what an external mentor can offer a senior leader and how structured learning becomes useful when it's applied to live decisions.
Kevin described KCI's position in a phrase that kept returning to our discussions:
"Doing the right things well matters more than doing lots of things fast."
That stage of growth can be demanding for any leader. Opportunities still arrive and many of them look worth pursuing.
At the same time, the business needs clearer priorities, stronger management capability and enough structure to grow without damaging the qualities customers already value.
For KCI, those decisions sit within a technical, safety-critical service.
Poorly judged growth could weaken margins and strain the trust the company has earned. Kevin understood that from our first session, which gave our conversations a useful degree of candour.
Strategy was one recurring subject. Kevin wanted it to guide the next quarter's choices and the allocation of time and resources. He had little interest in producing a polished slide deck that no-one used.
We also worked through delegation and the need to build capability across the team.
Leaders often have to re-learn delegation as a company changes because responsibilities that once sat naturally with them can start to restrict progress.
Structure raised similar questions. KCI needed clearer ways of working, but new processes had to suit a team accustomed to moving quickly. Added care was required so that useful discipline didn't harden into bureaucracy.
These challenges appear in many growing companies. KCI's technical work and reliance on customer confidence brought them into particularly sharp focus.
Kevin did most of the thinking in our sessions.
I created the space for him to examine a decision aloud, challenge his first answer and follow an idea further than the working day usually allows.
I had no organisational stake in the outcome and no reason to tell him what he wanted to hear.
That independence is difficult to reproduce inside a business.
Kevin has a leadership team, a board and experienced people whose views he respects. Their conversations still carry organisational consequences. A half-formed thought voiced in a board meeting can quickly acquire the weight of a proposal.
With a mentor, a director can test the thought while it's still uncertain, admit where their reasoning feels weak and leave without having set anything in motion.
This space proved useful because the subjects were consequential.
Kevin could explore how a change might affect the team, question whether an opportunity deserved attention or rehearse the reasoning behind a decision before taking it back into the company.
Business conversations often use "coach" and "mentor" interchangeably, although the working relationship changes depending on which role has been agreed.
Under the ILM framework in which I trained, coaching is largely non-directive.
The coach relies on questions and keeps their own experience and opinions in the background. A mentor can draw on relevant experience and offer a view when it will help.
Kevin and I established those expectations during our initial contracting conversation. He wanted room to think and also valued an informed sounding board who could push back or offer a comparison from another setting.
Being clear about the relationship made it easier for both of us to judge what each session needed.
Permission to share experience must be used carefully. Advice given too quickly can close down the other person's thinking or steer them towards an answer that fits the mentor's history.
Some of our most productive moments came from a question that helped Kevin reach a stronger answer for himself.
The balance shifted from session to session. At times I stayed mostly silent and asked occasional questions that required Kevin to examine an assumption.
Elsewhere, I drew on my experience of organisational change or said directly when something in the argument didn't add up.
Learning when to speak and when to wait became the part of my own practice I worked on most consciously.
Kevin's reflection at the end of Help to Grow: Management captures the practical value he found in the programme:
"What I've taken most from the course isn't theory for theory's sake.
"It's practical thinking around being clearer on strategy and priorities, building capability in the team and putting better structure around growth without losing what makes the business work."
The cohort also played a significant part. Its members came from different sectors, yet many faced recognisable versions of the same problems.
Kevin found that the openness of those conversations made the learning "far richer" than he had expected. Another director's experience can expose assumptions that have gone unchallenged inside your own company.
Help to Grow: Management combines business-school teaching with one-to-one mentoring. The course introduces frameworks and shared language.
Mentoring gives the director somewhere private to work out how those ideas fit the company, how they affect an immediate decision and where the standard model needs adapting.
That link to current work helps prevent the learning from being filed away after the session.
As a director, you might ask whether the programme will teach you something new.
Experienced leaders usually know the principles of strategy, delegation and team development. The programme asks how consistently they apply that knowledge and where habit has replaced conscious choice.
A more revealing question is whether you're prepared to speak honestly with a mentor, your cohort and yourself.
That means bringing unfinished thinking into the room, accepting challenge and following through afterwards.
The value of 10 appointments depends on the thinking between them and the decisions that follow.
I expected the work to develop my mentoring practice, although I hadn't anticipated how much I'd learn from Kevin.
As the sessions progressed, he became increasingly skilled at questioning his own reasoning. My most useful contribution was often a well-judged question or direct observation, followed by enough silence for him to think.
Kevin finished the programme looking forward to putting the work into practice. By then, change was already visible in the questions he asked and the care he brought to the choices ahead.
