The COVID-19 Crisis is a Mentorship Opportunity: Here’s How to Take Advantage of It


Companies around the globe are struggling to manage and motivate their workforces and enable productivity while dealing with economic uncertainty and layoffs. And while it may seem odd to think about employee retention during this crisis, there’s never been a more important time to focus on how you are supporting your employees—and the future of your business.
No one can be sure what the “right” business decisions to make to manage through this crisis will be. But we do know that gender-diverse leadership teams make better decisions overall. Mixed teams were 21% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies led by predominantly male teams, said a 2018 McKinsey study.
Chances are that your leadership team isn’t gender-diverse, though. Women hold only 10% of top management positions in S&P 1500 companies, says a 2017 analysis by the Pew Research Center. Only 28% of women are satisfied with the level of diversity and sense of inclusion and belonging at their company, found PowerToFly’s 2020 What Women Want report.
To fix that, your company has two options: looking outside or looking inside.
The biggest prong of an outside-focused initiative is usually recruiting. But if your company is facing layoffs and furloughs, recruiting is (understandably!) unlikely to be a top-of-mind focus right now.
That leaves the looking-inward approach. What people do you already have working for you that can be trained up to take on leadership roles and balance out the diversity of your top teams? And how can you help them unlock their potential?
Mentorship. The practice of guiding and advising a protégé has long been proven to work to increase promotions and career satisfaction and decrease turnover in the mentee pool. And it’s what underrepresented groups want, too: the What Women Want report found that 82% of women surveyed wanted their companies to offer more professional development opportunities.
And let’s get practical: mentorship is one of the most cost-effective ways you can invest in training and promoting diverse talent. You don’t need to shell out for expensive conferences. You probably already know who the rising stars at the junior levels of your organization are. You just need to set them up with someone more senior who can help them navigate the transition to a leadership role.
If your team is already strapped for time, you can utilize a cost-efficient third-party mentorship service to assist in finding mentors and managing logistics, or you can introduce mentorship in smaller ways and create a culture of paying it forward. Here’s how to start:
Remember, mentorship is one of the single most effective ways to build leadership potential with the resources you already have available. And in a climate of uncertainty and increased stress, employees will be especially likely to benefit from having a seasoned advisor to call on. To get through this, we need to work together—and mentorship is one of the best ways to do that.