Mentorship can be one of the most powerful forces in shaping a leader’s path—but it often happens quietly, behind the scenes. An encouraging word from a coach. A timely introduction from a seasoned colleague. A vote of confidence from someone who sees potential before it’s obvious. These moments don’t just shape the next generation of leaders; they open doors to possibilities that might otherwise remain closed.
It’s this quiet power of mentorship that lies at the heart of a movement that Dina Powell McCormick and Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick want to ignite—a movement centered on the belief in the transformative potential of investing in one another. Their new book, Who Believed in You?, explores this idea through powerful stories from leaders like fashion designer Tory Burch, Governors Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Wes Moore, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and producer Brian Grazer, each explaining how they got to where they are. Some of their stories may surprise you—like Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella crediting Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with helping him think about a deeper meaning to work.
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These unexpected moments reveal how mentorship often happens out of the spotlight, when a mentor quietly invests in someone’s future, the McCormicks tell TIME. “We realized in talking to so many leaders that are featured in the book that it was the unsung heroes that changed their lives,” says Powell McCormick, a former Goldman Sachs executive who served as deputy national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and is now vice chairman of BDT & MSD Partners. “Teachers, football coaches, parents, bosses and those people didn’t just help them get a job or get a promotion or get nominated to something; those people helped them shape their life, shape their value system, deal with challenges, deal with failures.”
For the McCormicks, this book is just the beginning of a movement that they hope will inspire leaders to recognize the mentors in their own lives—and, perhaps more importantly, to become mentors themselves. Because, as they’ve learned firsthand, these quiet acts of belief can change everything, and become part of a leader’s legacy. “For those people that are reading this story,” Senator McCormick says, “I want to encourage them to go back to the people who believed in them and tell them ‘thank you,’ because it is a great gift.”
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Who Believed in You? is your debut book, Dina, and it’s the first time the two of you have written together. What moved you to write this book and to do so together?
Dina Powell McCormick: Well, it was actually during COVID. We have six daughters between us and Who Believed In You? did not start out as a book. It started out as a realization that we had that our six daughters and so many young people did not only miss out on high school, prom, high school graduation, they actually missed out on human connectivity that was really critical in the form of mentorship, particularly in those years of their lives. And for me and Dave, it really was a few people, one or two people that invested in us, that saw something in us that we did not see in ourselves, and that is the reason we are where we are today. And so we started asking other people who believed in you, from Satya Nadella to Tory Burch to David Chang to Brian Grazer to governors like Sarah Huckabee and Governor Wes Moore. And what we realized is everybody had somebody that believed in them and that changed their life. And our hope is that whobelievedinyou.com will actually be more than just the end. This book is the beginning we hope for a movement to encourage mentoring so that people really do believe that investing in one person can change the world.
Dave McCormick: When we started to talk to some of our friends, many of them very successful, influential people, as Dina mentioned, this was a common theme, and so we wanted to tell those stories. But the book is not about the famous people, it’s about the people you’ve never heard of, for the most part, who helped them become who they are and have such an impact on the world. And so, as Dina said, the central theme here is, you don’t have to be a famous person to change someone’s life, to change your community, to potentially have a huge effect on the country or the world by helping people become their best selves, the next generation of leaders. You can have an enormous impact.
And Dina, you’ve built mentoring initiatives in both the public and private sectors, with 10,000 Women at Goldman Sachs, and the One Million Black Women initiative. What impact have you seen firsthand from these initiatives—has it led to job growth or the development of new leadership skills—and why do you believe mentoring is so important to entrepreneurs?
DPM: I actually believe mentoring is critical to entrepreneurs, especially some of the entrepreneurs that we worked with through those programs, while they were obviously interested in the business education that they received, which was vital, or the access to capital, which made, obviously a significant difference, having a mentor, having a business advisor, often from Goldman Sachs, because we had so many people that wanted to serve as mentors. We had partnerships with Bloomberg, and many people at Bloomberg wanted to serve as business advisors, to read the business plans, to help them focus on their market segment, to help them think about marketing, to think about the growth of their business. But honestly, the most important trait these mentors instilled was confidence in the entrepreneur. It can be very lonely starting a business and being a small business owner, and to just have someone that was willing to say, “you got this, you will be successful,” probably was the most invaluable piece of it.
Dina, you immigrated to the U.S. at age five, not speaking a word of English. You’ve had an extraordinary journey from those humble beginnings to leadership roles in business and government, working in two White Houses and becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs. How did the mentors who believed in you influence your mindset and contribute to your journey?
DPM: I have been blessed by so many mentors and those in the private sector and serving in government, and I’ll tell you one that was particularly important in my life. As you said, I was five years old when I immigrated to the United States and didn’t speak English. I went to the University of Texas at Austin, and in order to pay for college, I was waitressing, and I met Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and she said, “I would like to mentor you and I see something special in you,” and eventually, she asked me to come and intern for her in Washington, D.C. My parents were not so happy about this. My parents, growing up, used to tell me and my sisters, ‘we left our homeland so you three girls can reach your potential and be anything you want to be, as long as you’re a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer.’ I had gotten into law school. I was heading to law school. They could not believe that I was going to go to Washington and work for her, and that changed my life. She not only gave me that opportunity, she gave me the confidence to not be so scared of taking that risk, of going off my path, of not listening to what everyone else is telling me I should do. And of course, that led me then to a completely different career, both in government, at Goldman Sachs and today as vice chairman of BDT & MSD Partners.
And Senator McCormick, you went to West Point and served as an Army Paratrooper, then led several businesses, and now you’re a U.S. Senator. How did mentorship shape your leadership style and could you share a story of someone who believed in you?
DM: Just like Dina, I’ve been blessed by a number of mentors over the years that I that I attribute a lot of my success to, but there’s one in particular who was a football coach—and by the way, we say in the book, our parents were big parts of our lives and many people’s lives, but the mentors that made a difference were beyond our parents, an additional difference. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was kind of a mediocre football player, would ride the bench during the game, kind of get in at the end of the game. A new coach came in and he watched all the films of the previous season, and he called me and said, “I think you’ve got real potential. I’m going to give you an opportunity, and you got to work really hard in camp.” And he ended up making me the captain of the team. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, and I went on to have a great football career. I was All-State football player, and that single thing was why I got recruited to West Point. And the start of going into West Point, it literally took me on a path outside my small town in rural Pennsylvania, and put me on the career path that I had. It made a huge difference. There were many others, but that was one that really left a mark early on. I was in Iraq and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia for about a year during the Gulf War, and I wrote him a note, and I just told him how important he was to me, which I’m so glad I did, because when he died, I talked to his son, and his son said that that letter was one of the most important things to him. And that was what we picked up in our interviews with people in the book, is that many of them didn’t think they had said thank you enough to the people that had changed their lives. So for those people that are reading this story, I want to encourage them to go back to the people who believed in them and tell them thank you, because it is a great gift.
And Who Believed in You? features stories from several leaders across business and government. Could each of you share one of your favorite stories or lessons from the leaders featured in your book?
DM: One of my favorites is Brian Grazer, who is a Hollywood producer and has won the Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. He tells a story about a Hollywood executive at a big motion picture studio named Deanne Barkley, and she met with him early on in his career. He was trying to sell screenplays, and he had a meeting with her, where in the middle of the meeting, the canary behind her in the cage dropped over dead, and she had this hilarious reaction, and they connected. And she bought his two movies, which were Night Shift and Splash, which went on to be very successful. But as she spent time with him, she noticed he wasn’t getting the traction that he thought he should, and that she thought he should, and she pulled him aside, she said, “The thing I’m noticing is people think you exaggerate. People think you’re lying and so they’re not following up.” And he was horrified, and it changed his behavior. It was a fork in the road of his career, and it changed him forever. The takeaway was, you need mentors, but you need mentors that will tell you the hard truth. We all want to be successful. We all want our kids to live the American dream, but mentors that will give you tough love, they give you a special gift. And so seek someone you trust that you can be vulnerable with and that can be honest with you.
DPM: We have a wonderful chapter where Tory Burch talks about her mentors. And one of the most important mentors that she had in her life was her father, and he instilled in her this sense of confidence. And she tells the story about starting Tory Burch at her kitchen table with a shoe, the Reva shoe—obviously a very scary thing to do. And she actually wanted to start Tory Burch because she really wanted to empower other female entrepreneurs. Today, it’s a wildly successful fashion brand and company, but her foundation, the Tory Burch Foundation, is one of the largest foundations that invests in female entrepreneurs in the United States, and she tells a story in the book about how somebody in an interview once asked her, “Would you call yourself ambitious?” She said “No,” and a mentor called her up and said, “You should be proud to say you’re ambitious. There is nothing wrong with ambition.” And that really had an impact on her, and of course, she is such a role model now to so many other entrepreneurs. And there’s also a very important need for mentors in industries that are male dominated. I was lucky that I had a lot of male mentors. Obviously, finance tends to be a male dominated industry, and you need that perspective of the people that are in the room, the people that are really going to be those individuals that are going to help you grow. And one of them for me, I worked for two CEOs of Goldman Sachs—Lloyd Blankfein and David Solomon. Lloyd used to say, “I know you call me my mentor, but let’s be honest, I’m your tormentor.” But what he really meant, and I value this to this day, and this is a very important part of the book: tough love. Constructive feedback is a gift. If you have a mentor that cares enough about you to tell you how you can work on your weaknesses and grow, it is truly a gift. And I always felt that I had those individuals in my life as well.
You emphasize in the book that leadership rooted in values is essential for shaping communities. How do you both interpret “values-based leadership,” and why is mentorship integral in nurturing these kinds of leaders?
DM: We make a distinction in the book between transactional mentorship and transformative mentorship. Transactional is, how do you help me get this interview? How can I get the next promotion? For transformative interviews, how can I live a life of purpose? How can I become my best self? It’s elevated. It’s about living the good life and contributing to society and everything you do. And those kinds of mentoring relationships have four components. The first is a trusting relationship, where you can be completely vulnerable, you know that this person is there to help you and vice versa. It’s a relationship of mutuality. The second is values, where we talk about that inspiration, around contribution to others, around service, around integrity, about something bigger than yourself. The third component is commitment. So, to have a successful mentoring relationship, you have to have mutual commitment to one another. And finally, it’s confidence, because one of the things you need early in your life, often is you have failure. Failure is an inevitable part of success, and you have setbacks, you have failure, you have uncertainty, and to have a mentor that can help inspire confidence to take risk, confidence to overcome failure. So those components are the building blocks of transformational mentoring, and what we think is so powerful for helping really bring about the kind of leadership we need in the country.
For someone who is looking for a mentor but isn’t sure where to begin—what are the first steps to identifying a potential mentor, and how should they approach this relationship to ensure it’s productive?
DPM: I think being deliberative, one of the things that we realized in talking to so many leaders that are featured in the book is that it was the unsung heroes that changed their lives: teachers, football coaches, parents, bosses and those people didn’t just help them get a job or get a promotion or get nominated to something, those people helped them shape their life, shape their value system, deal with challenges, deal with failures. And so inherently, you have to pick someone that you believe will really be someone that mentors you in all the elements of your life. You have to actually seek them out with a bit of a plan. And we talk about that in the book. What is it that that person can really mentor you on? What is it in that person’s life that you want to emulate, and then you also have to have a plan, which is: How regularly can we connect? Can I be very respectful of your time? Can it be more quality than quantity? Because honestly, mentors are very busy people. Definitionally, they want to mentor, they want to help, but you do have to be an efficient mentee. “Here’s where I really need your help. Here’s how often I would love to be connected,” and frankly, “I’m going to be open to the things that you have to say to me, and I’d love to have that relationship.”
What do you find to be the most rewarding part of being a mentor?
DPM: It’s the greatest legacy, I think, for many leaders. For me, personally, I have had such a blessing of having the opportunity to serve as a mentor, and I have gotten just as much back as I have given. I feel that those people care about me. They will often call me and say, “You might want to see this a little differently.” So there’s also the mentor-mentee relationship. It definitely goes both ways. A question that I’ve often thought of, that leaders should think about is, where are all the people that worked for you? Did you invest in them? Did they grow? Did they find their purpose working with you, or when they left and grew and went somewhere else? Did you stay connected? Did you cheer them on? Did you do whatever you could to support them? I think if leaders thought about that consistently, it would really make an impact to a lot of other leaders that they’re developing.
DM: There’s nothing more satisfying than knowing that because of the mentorship you’ve been able to provide, you’ve been able to help someone get on the right path, make the right difference, have the right level of fulfillment. So Dina in particular, but me as well, when you’re blessed with the kinds of careers we’ve had, you get to encounter lots of people along the way, and you get to see them rise and make a big difference in their own right, and so that’s very fulfilling. And a key message of this is: the large majority of the people that we talk about in the book are people you have never heard of. They are the coaches and the teachers and the administrators, the neighbors, the uncles that took on this special interest. So it is commitment to others, the fulfillment that comes with that, helping others find their best self. So it’s an act of selflessness that, in the end, becomes incredibly fulfilling for the mentor as well.
