Breaking Through

Part IVMentoring Program Success Stories

MENTORING AND SPONSORING PRODUCE A RANGE of benefits—not only for the mentee, but also for the mentor. In this section, mentees and mentors tell us about how they've benefited from their mentoring programs.

These benefits include changes in their attitudes about work, in their personalities and in their ambitions, positive impacts on their careers, and improved relationships with their colleagues. Tabitha Coombe tells how mentoring made her more aware of career opportunities within BNP Paribas, and raised her ambitions. A fellow mentor, but in ENGIE, Matthias Curnier describes mentoring as win-win, saying that it's a great opportunity to meet new people and understand new ways of thinking. Matthias's mentee, Paola Vezzaro, as an Italian in a French group, said she wanted mentoring to educate her about how the group worked, and what was sacred and taboo—and she got what she was looking for and more: mentoring helped her career progression, and, now that she is geographically far from the group's head office, mentoring enables her to stay in touch with the heart of decision-making and strategy.

Paula Craythorne, at Oracle, views mentoring as sponsoring—as a relationship that can tangibly help her to develop her career, and her colleague, Nicoleta Apostol, says that mentoring works if you have a clear understanding of what it can do for you: have a tangible goal, be ready to take the initiative, and aim to become visible. Nicoleta says that ...