It’s time to redefine mentorship in the hybrid workplace

With all the challenges hybrid work poses to career development, it’s almost as if employees need a mentor to help them navigate mentorship. That’s partly the thinking behind CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion’s Mentoring Initiative, a PwC-sponsored program that pairs participants with fellow mentees and a mentor outside of their own companies.

The hope is that the program offers mentees a safe space to talk openly about their biggest professional challenges, from finding the right mentor to dealing with office politics, Michael Fenlon, PwC’s chief future of work officer, told HR Brew.

Navigating mentorship. The mentoring initiative was launched last year by the coalition, which was first started in 2017 by Tim Ryan, chairman and senior partner at PwC.

According to Fenlon, the coalition, consisting of 2,400 organizations, requested nominations for high-potential employees who could advance to upper management or the C-suite. As part of the program, cohorts of seven to 10 mentees meet with a mentor virtually over a period of six months. More than 400 mentors and mentees have participated in the initiative since it started last year, and a fourth cohort is kicking off this July, per PwC.

While the program isn’t intended to replace the traditional mentoring relationships employees build within their company, Fenlon suggested the program could help participants better navigate these relationships in a hybrid environment.

“In our experience, just inside of our own firm, those are relationships that are strongest when they’re developed organically…But how do you do that? Like, how do you cultivate sponsors and mentors? It’s not just a matter of hoping it occurs,” he said. “I think external mentoring can help support that goal.”

A safe space. Melanie Armstrong, a mentor with the CEO Action initiative and former partner at PwC, said she also sees value in external mentorship. While at PwC, “I told all my direct reports, ‘You need a mentor that is not me. Because what if you’re frustrated with me?’” she recalled. “You should have somebody else that you can just go bounce ideas off that isn’t reviewing your performance.”

Armstrong said members of her cohort were able to talk candidly about challenges they were facing at work. During one session, she said, they discussed office politics—a topic that could’ve been tough to broach with a mentor internally.

“We talked a lot about the meeting before the meeting,” Armstrong said, referring to a strategy of speaking with individual colleagues beforehand to get them all on board with a particular idea. Sometimes, Armstrong said, members of her cohort will try out these strategies at work, and discuss whether they were effective with the mentoring group.

Perry King, a trust assurance solutions director for PwC and a mentee in a different cohort, said the program allowed for more transparent conversations. “You just felt at ease and…more open to speak on things,” said King, who is hoping to one day make partner at the firm.

Boosting diversity. From striking the right balance on workplace flexibility to developing a strategy for new technologies like AI, the demands on today’s C-suite leaders have never been higher, Fenlon said.

At the same time, C-suites remain overwhelmingly white and male. This imbalance is reflected in mentorship trends. Women, for example, spend less time getting mentored than men, especially when they work from home, according to a survey conducted by WFH Research in April and May.

“It’s easy to invest in helping people that we identify the most easily with,” Fenlon said.

The hope of CEO Action and the mentoring initiative, he said, is to raise awareness around the power of mentoring relationships, and encourage organizations to invest in cultivating them equitably across their workforces.