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 mentoring gave her the strategic insights that she felt she needed in order to progress. For her mentor, Giovanna Sangiorgi, mentoring was initially about giving back, helping and challenging women to be comfortable with leadership and power—but after some years, it helped her to know herself better, to know what she was good at, and what made her a good leader.

At Publicis, both mentee Charlotte Guillabert, and mentor Michele Gilbert, reflect upon the benefits their relationship brings. For Charlotte, it is about career development and how to attain a senior position; whereas Michele believes that mentoring can help employees find a route through difficult situations, since the sharing of experiences and talking to someone who can see the bigger picture can help to relieve any anxiety and stress you might feel when you begin to have doubts about your abilities.

For Regina Meredith-Carpeni, at BNY Mellon, including men in the mentoring relationship can give women the exposure and recognition that helps them to be considered for the next promotion or assignment—she feels this is particularly important for women caught in what she refers to as the “frozen middle,” those women who have fallen off the radar of “top talent” once they've taken a leave of absence for child-raising. In addition to a traditional mentoring program, BNY Mellon also runs reverse mentoring, where senior executives are mentored by junior millenials. For mentor Yoon Park, recently arrived in the bank, mentoring gives her an understanding of the company's strategic initiatives and projects. For her mentee, Jeff Kuhn, talking to Yoon gives him the opportunity to understand what motivates the millenials in the bank and what they're looking for, and how he can apply that knowledge to developing the talent in the bank.

Part IV of the book tells us exactly what it's like to be involved in a mentoring program, both as a mentee and as a mentor.