There is a saying in mentoring circles that people become mentors for one of two reasons. Either they had an exceptional mentor themselves, someone who believed in them, steered them, and helped them see what they were capable of. Or they didn’t, and they know exactly what that absence cost them.
I am firmly in the second camp.
I had not had an intentional mentor. Nobody who sat down with me and said, here is where I think you are going, here is how I am going to help you get there. That absence is one of the reasons I am so passionate about creating mentoring frameworks and learning cultures inside organisations. I know what it means to navigate without that kind of support.
My career has been squiggly by any measure. I started as a city solicitor. I spent fifteen years in live events, which I loved, and then into transformation and change before I put all of it together into my own consultancy. I fell into each of them, and each taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way. But where I am now, working with founders and leadership teams on organisational design and development, that path started from lunchtime conversations about ten years ago.
I was working alongside a colleague called Laura. We had started at the same organisation at the same time and had become the kind of work friends that sustain you through the difficult stretches. We were, to be honest, having a whinge. The long lunch, the honest debrief, the working through of everything that was frustrating us about the organisation we were in. Laura came from project management, business architecture and large-scale transformation, and as she talked about the structure underneath organisations, the way decisions were made, accountability flowed, teams were designed to interact – something shifted for me.
She gave me the language for things I had been feeling for years.
From my events days I had walked into boardrooms and known, almost immediately, from the dynamic in the room, whether a project was going to go well. Whether the people around the table were genuinely aligned on what they were trying to achieve, or whether they were performing alignment while pulling in different directions. Where they weren’t aligned, I knew to brace my team for a bumpy ride. I had always sensed that what got described as a people problem was rarely really a people problem. Laura gave me the language and the framework to understand why.
She wasn’t setting out to mentor me. She was being generous with what she knew over lunch. But that is what informal mentoring looks like; someone who shares their perspective at exactly the moment you need it.
What I have come to understand, though, is that informal mentoring can only take you so far. Professional mentoring, structured, purposeful, delivered by someone with genuine expertise and trained to bring the best out of the people they work with, takes it to another level entirely.
The difference is not just the quality of conversation. It is consistency, accountability, and the kind of honest challenge that a good friend over lunch will rarely sustain across months and years of working through something genuinely hard.
That is what the ABM exists to champion and it is why I wanted to be part of it.
From those conversations with Laura, my work in organisational design grew. I moved from large organisations, where whole teams exist to think about transformation and change, into scaling businesses, and found something that surprised me. Founders who had built genuinely impressive things were struggling, blaming themselves, wondering if the problem was their leadership. Almost every time, the real issue was structural. The organisation had grown organically and the design hadn’t kept pace. What looked like a people problem was a design problem.
Organisational design and development covers the org chart and everything underneath it. Leadership governance, team dynamics, how decisions get made and who is accountable for them. When it is working, nobody notices. When it is not, everyone feels it: the team pulling in different directions, the leadership meeting where the same issues surface week after week, the good person who leaves and nobody can fully explain why.
Mentoring sits right at the heart of that. It’s fundamental to how a healthy organisation learns and grows. The ABM’s research found that seventy percent of businesses strongly agree that workplace mentoring has positively impacted overall business performance. Sixty-six percent report improved retention and talent attraction. When mentoring is embedded deliberately, when leaders are properly supported, when managers are developed well enough to develop others in turn, the whole organisation performs differently. A genuine learning culture becomes self-perpetuating.
I joined the ABM board because I believe professional mentoring deserves to be taken seriously at the highest level of every organisation. My hope, and my intention as a NED, is to contribute to a future where more businesses understand what a professional mentoring culture can do, more people have access to mentors who are genuinely skilled at what they do, and the standards that make that possible continue to rise.
