Financial Promoter sits down with OakNorth’s Valentina Kristensen to discuss the benefits and downfalls of mentorship schemes within the industry.
Mentorship schemes provide the necessary conditions for employees to thrive.
They also yield higher profits for companies and improve employee retention, according to MentorcliQ’s 2023 study. It’s no wonder that 92% of Fortune 500 companies – and 100% of the top 50 – have mentoring programmes.
However, the 2022 HR Research “Mentoring in the workplace” report says 36% of all organisations do not have either formal or informal mentorship schemes.
At its launch in 2015, OakNorth was the third new bank in the UK in 150 years.
Its business model of lending to the UK’s “missing middle” – small and medium-sized enterprises – has seen rapid growth, lending £1.6 billion to its customers in 2022.
Valentina Kristensen, director of growth and communications at OakNorth, joined the start up seven years ago as the organisation’s first in-house marcomms employee.
Mentor, role model, champion
Employee guidance comes in three forms, says Kristensen: mentors, role models, champions.
Mentorships are often found through structured programmes, such as through the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and both mentors and role models are usually in a position of seniority or power, either professionally or personally.
Having a mentor only one or two steps more senior – or perhaps even in the same life phase – can be valuable to an employee’s nurturing, says Kristensen.
“If you’re speaking with someone who has got kids, a big mortgage to pay, and is not willing to take high risk in their life, they’re going to look at it from that perspective. If they’re a great mentor, they’ll hopefully say: you’re young, you have the ability to do it now, so go and do it.”
A champion is someone who will fight in a colleague’s corner – often unbeknownst to them – at board meetings, with clients, and at networking meetings.
“They push you to challenge yourself. Once, Rishi [OakNorth’s CEO] couldn’t do an interview and he pushed me to do it for him. As a result, it’s made my presentation skills in other parts of my career so much easier,” says Kristensen.
Empowered by her champion, these speaking opportunities increased and led to more openings for Kristensen.
As a result, she was approached by Money 20/20 to participate in its global payments race two years running.
“The first year, I was given wearable technology as my form of payment to race around Europe. We had a number of tasks and a number of countries we had to visit. I had to use wearable technology [a ring and an Apple Watch] to make all payments, stay in hotels, and so on.
“It was a pretty cool adventure that I went on. Because I started doing speaking and have proven that I am fine in front of a camera, it led to this opportunity,” says Kristensen.
Valentina’s experience demonstrates the breadth of opportunity that can come from having champions in the workplace.
Doing good
Mentorship schemes are only part of OakNorth’s commitment to scaling with purpose.
In 2018, OakNorth made a formal commitment to its 1% + 1% scheme, which builds on OakNorth’s tradition of donating 1% of its group profits to charitable causes, with the other 1% contributing to team time.
The team time contribution funds employees to take time away from their day job to participate in mentoring, fundraising, and volunteering for initiatives they feel are important.
“The scheme absolutely makes sense to the business because we’ve always had a strong social purpose, given that the focus of our whole business is to help those missing middle companies.
“And we’ve really enhanced the impact that they have by supporting schemes like this, by doing things like increasing the entrepreneurship pipeline in the UK and helping to have more young people thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential career path,” says Kristensen.
In fact, the financial support offered through the mentoring and fundraising from OakNorth’s 1% + 1% scheme directly feeds back into its business model.
“The more entrepreneurs we have, the more job creation, the more innovation, and open activity. We have way more men who come in looking for loans than women. And that’s just because male entrepreneurs outnumber female entrepreneurs in the UK, five to one.”
By helping more female entrepreneurs get on the ladder and reach the point where their business is of a size to get a loan, OakNorth is investing in its future business, adds Kristensen.
OakNorth has also partnered with the London School of Economics on a formal initiative called “mentorpreneurship,” combining mentoring with entrepreneurial skills.
The scheme gives students the right mentoring at different points of their entrepreneurial journey, says Kristensen.
“As part of that we are launching a mentoring certificate, so people can actually go and get a qualification in mentoring.”
Benefitting your business
The median profits for Fortune 500 companies with mentoring programs are over three times higher than for those without mentoring programs, according to MentorcliQ’s 2023 data.
These higher profits are largely down to employee retention, where companies avoid high recruitment costs and laborious processes taking up stakeholder time, according to the study.
Deloitte’s 2016 “Millennial survey” says employees who intend to stay with their organisation for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor.
Prospective and current employees want to be part of a company that is doing well, profitable, and provides job security, says Kristensen.
But employees also increasingly want to work for companies that look after their employees, are good corporate citizens, and have a strong social purpose, she adds.
“When employees come to OakNorth, it should be a nice surprise that they can see OakNorth really cares about its initiatives.”
Internally, OakNorth markets its 1% + 1% initiative to aid employee retention.
“Around once every quarter, we’ll invite one of the charities that we work with to come in and actually talk about the impact that the office support has had.
“Equally, team members who have gone and done some volunteering will be asked to share a little bit about that experience. That reminds everybody this is something you can do if you haven’t taken advantage of it yet,” says Kristensen.
Having formal mentorship schemes can also feed into company culture, creating better leaders and forging informal and organic relationships that benefit from the formal training.
“Being part of formal mentoring makes my informal mentoring better.
“Because I’m part of a structured programme, I think about the kinds of questions that I’m supposed to be asking, how I’m supposed to be listening, and then try to think, I can have those kinds of conversations with a whole bunch of other people,” says Kristensen.
Becoming your own champion
Learning which advice to listen to – and whether or not to follow it – is important to consider as mentoring relationships evolve, says Kristensen.
“Some of my mentors today are people I used to work with from when I first started my career at 21 – they might have been a director on accounts that I worked on as a trainee. They have stayed with me since and the relationship has been more of an evolution.”
With newer mentorship relationships earlier in her career, however, Kristensen had to evaluate the advice she received.
Joining OakNorth in 2016 saw Kristensen leave a secure, in-house PR role for a start up challenger bank.
“When I spoke to my mentors who were around 50, they said: no, you need to have another 10 years’ experience before you can run a comms function.
“And why would you join a startup? It’s so high risk, there’s so many new banks coming now – how do you know this one’s going to do anything good?” Kristensen was asked.
It’s these learning opportunities that help turn young mentees into successful mentors later on in their careers.
“If you’re lucky enough to have mentors, then you should absolutely try and pay it forward and be a mentor to others,” adds Kristensen.
Where mentorships thrive, they create pools of opportunities for mentees, helping them to enter and win awards, introduce them to industry contacts, and give both professional and personal advice, says Kristensen.
This article is taken from the print edition of Financial Promoter. Click here to subscribe.