"Mentoring" as a single word hides a lot of variation. Throughout my career, I have been mentored maybe once or twice, max. I got guided through structure primarily by seeking out top-notch paid coaches. Money well invested.

Mentoring others is a journey that started for me in 2008, when Deutsche Bank’s HR department asked me to become a ‘buddy’, which meant being a junior mentor in a programme designed to take on analysts from less privileged backgrounds and less prestigious universities. As a refugee who had to prove herself in the Swiss school system, I saw joining this programme as a no-brainer.

As the years went on, so did my mentoring engagement, which I formally carried out over many years through my former employer, Deutsche Bank, in London. That was the initial kick-off ground.

Mentoring someone within your own division is different from mentoring someone two or three functions away, not primarily because the leadership or communication challenges differ, but because you first have to quickly and accurately understand the specific technical and organisational terrain they're operating in before any advice you give is useful. Over the years, I noticed a pattern: more and more of the people I mentored weren't just looking for a sounding board; they wanted to understand how someone had made a genuine cross-lateral move, how to build the case, when to make it, and who to have on your side. Having made several such moves myself across my banking career, I made that a specific strength I could offer.

Other key areas of mentees needing to have addressed have been positioning, landing roles externally, packaging up their experiences to pitch themselves across industries, and, unsurprisingly, how to handle a difficult box or a toxic team altogether.

That's what drew me to WIFA's mentoring stream: the chance to work with mentees from across industries, not just within a single bank's divisions, which kept stretching that skill in ways a single institution never could.

When my co-chairs and I took this on, there was no existing structure to inherit. We built the matching methodology, the mentor pool, and the programme design from the ground up. Early on, I pushed for diversity in mentor backgrounds beyond what our sponsor firms alone could offer. In the first year, in particular, I drew directly on my network across banking and fintech to bring in mentors whose experience wouldn't otherwise have been represented in the programme, because a mentee's growth is only as good as the range of real, lived experience available to learn from.

At the launch event, one key topic was having your own "Board of Directors", i.e., drawing on multiple people and perspectives rather than relying on one relationship to carry everything. I've never worked with that exact framework myself, but I think the underlying instinct is right, with one important caveat: more mentors are not automatically better. What matters is whether each relationship is mapped to a specific goal. If you're aiming for a cross-lateral move, you want someone who has actually made that kind of move, ideally across financial hubs, not just up within one. If you're stepping into people leadership, you need someone who can speak to managing and growing a team, not just to their own individual career. Stack too many mentors without that clarity of purpose, and you often end up with conflicting advice and diluted attention, which becomes noise that is hard to draw from. 

The other thing I believe strongly, and rarely hear said out loud: a mentoring relationship isn't something a mentee simply receives. It has to be maintained. The mentee carries real responsibility for keeping the relationship alive and useful, and the best mentoring relationships I've been part of, on either side, have always had that mutual investment and a clarified understanding built in from the start.