A parent mentoring programme is helping Skipton Building Society retain talent, and boost diversity and inclusion. Tim Spackman and Nicki Seignot report

Since 1863, Skipton Building Society (SBS) has been a mutual building society, founded on values around doing the right thing for the customer and investing in people and the organisation to be sustainable over the
long term.

High levels of sustained employee engagement (more than 85% for the past seven years and 8th in the recent Sunday Times 25 Best Big Companies To Work For, 2020) and customer satisfaction (typically more than 90%), are outcomes of a people-centric, ‘human touch’ approach to business, where coaching and mentoring are part of daily life.

A key objective in SBS’ People Strategy is to be a diverse and inclusive employer, and as a result, parent mentoring was seen as a way of extending existing coaching and mentoring programmes to support colleagues who are balancing their role in their career and their role as a parent.

Aims and measures

SBS set out to introduce an internal peer-to-peer mentoring programme that connects working parents through one-to-one support and guidance. Internal and external research had resulted in some feedback from colleagues that there were inconsistent parental leave experiences during closedown, maternity/paternity leave, keeping in touch and returning to work.

SBS wanted to enable colleagues to transition back to work with ease and continue successfully with their careers in the organisation. While the approach was initially considered a way to support the careers of women over the long term, as part of a desire to retain talent and improve gender balance at senior levels, there was also a desire to include men, recognising their role and challenges as parents, too.

The aims were therefore to improve the colleague experience, retain talent and support colleagues in balancing the demands of work and home.

Integration

With coaching and mentoring already established, it’s been important to integrate parent mentoring into SBS’ existing frameworks. When the mentors began, they attended our internal mentoring workshop as well as an external parent mentoring workshop, so their practice was aligned to organisational expectations and external best practice. The parent mentoring programme has now become another form of mentoring in the overall framework, alongside career mentoring, reverse mentoring and the like.

This year, the people team has brought parent mentoring into the internal supervision framework, having initially sought external supervision on a quarterly basis for SBS mentors in the first year.

Why mentoring and not coaching?   

SBS has developed a strong cadre of internal coaches who support colleagues across a number of different development programmes and assignments. In a coaching context, there’s a requirement for the coach to remain ‘away from’ the arena while in mentoring, a mentor brings themselves and their experience as returners to the relationship.

There’s no doubt that mentoring as a practice draws on many of the core skills of coaching, including the ability to listen, to question and to create a safe space to support someone’s learning journey.

In the SBS context, parent mentoring connects parents-to-be with working parents who’ve already made the transition and returned to work. Specifically, it draws on the contextual experience and knowledge of the mentor, both as a parent AND employee with currency of insight from within the organisation.

 

Key enablers

There are a number of elements which set this programme up for success:

  • Senior buy in – from the outset, the mentoring programme had input and active sponsorship from board level and senior management. This translated into attendance at network events, opening development workshops, attendance at supervision reviews and participation as a parent mentor.
  • Personal ownership – the programme was owned and driven by one individual who took the lead as programme manager, managed matches, met with participants, fielded queries and was known as the go-to individual for the programme.
  • Learning culture – SBS evidences an organisation with a strong learning culture. Mentoring for all participants was an activity over and above the day job, yet attendance at workshops and supervision reviews was high each time. They followed through on actions and became advocates for the programme, including leading a workshop for line managers. Mentors came ready to share learning, questions and concerns and self-resourced across the group. This was an example of colleagues developing colleagues and making a difference.
  • Diversity of mentors – the parent mentors were drawn from a range of different job levels and functions, from commercial to finance, HR and operations. Some were already coaches, others not. There was no hierarchy of expertise. There was a balance of working mothers and working fathers to facilitate matching and in recognition that this was about enabling men as working fathers as well as supporting maternity returns.
  • Specialist knowledge up front – the pilot was developed and actively supported by The Parent Mentor, who brought external expertise and knowledge of best practice within the external marketplace and programme management. This support continued throughout the Covid-19 period of lockdown and set the programme up to extend beyond the pilot to a business as usual activity.

A gendered approach to mentoring

While acknowledging that the volume of support and need (particularly in terms of gender diversity) is concerned with women combining career and parenting, many coaching and mentoring programmes focus pretty much wholesale on working mothers and returning to work post maternity leave. Mentoring by a working mother who has survived the experience and made it back has substantial benefits for the female returner, including increased self-confidence, more effective tactics to manage competing priorities and a faster return to previous levels of performance and career focus.

Of course, many of the approaches and frameworks for mentoring mothers can also be applied to new fathers, but there are some fundamental points of divergence. The journey as a father is demonstrably different to that of a new mother and therefore requires a different approach reflective of that difference. Critically, mentors bring their (gendered) experience to their parent mentoring relationship first. In recognition of this, good practice must be for fathers to mentor fathers and mothers to mentor mothers.

At Skipton, matching did take gender into account and 12.5% of mentoring pairs were fathers supporting fathers. Feedback from participants and learning outcomes confirm our belief that this was the right approach.

Challenges

  • Expectations – the launch of a new programme carries the weight of expectation and there can be an ambition to offer mentoring for every parenting eventuality. In practice, there may be situations where there’s not a ready match for parent mentoring, eg, a parent looking for support as a returner with a child with autism, or a parent who has adopted a child.
  • Coaches as mentors – for some coaches, making the switch to mentoring and bringing their own experience was a challenge. As one coach notes, “It does feel like a change in gear when you’ve been in the coaching space.” Questions like this can be explored in supervision reviews and prompt a positive discussion about the value of ‘self’ in mentoring as well as the pros and cons of offering your own experience and advice giving. It’s important, however, to remember that while sharing experience is valuable in parent mentoring, every parent’s experience is unique, parenting does not always translate and the mentor will never have all the answers.
  • Mentee engagement – in parent mentoring, mentors come to the relationship in many respects ‘burdened’ by their own knowledge and very keen to share this and help another. The challenge can sometimes be that their mentee is not ready and possibly not feeling the need for help yet, depending on what stage they are on the journey. Ownership for learning should rest with the mentee, and this requires careful preparation (eg, mentee-specific workshops that set out what good looks like for all parties), clear contracting and flagging issues to the programme owner where a relationship may be fizzling out.
  • Getting the right level of support – our approach was to undertake a pilot, which worked well, with senior sponsorship from the outset and high visibility and support. Yet, as with any new venture, it was difficult at the start to know what level of resource was required. While the programme does not need to be onerous in terms of resources, it’s important to have clear ownership and a recognition that there’s a need to commit resource internally to scope, recruit and manage mentors and mentees, communicate and support workshops.
  • Role of the leader / line manager – while SBS advocates parent mentoring for off-line support, it’s important to recognise that the role of leaders is crucial, particularly at transitional times like becoming a parent. Skipton has strong family-friendly policies but it’s leaders who make or break them and who are responsible for a level of consistency of good practice in leading and managing the ‘whole person’, so leader education and awareness is key.
  • Remote mentoring – until recently, parent mentoring at SBS has been face-to-face and, partly as a result, uptake from among the branch network had been low. However, as everyone has become so much more comfortable recently with technology such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, this no longer needs to be a barrier – in fact one male parent mentor mentoring a young father got to see the new arrival for the first time as a result of both parties working from home!

 

Progress and impact

In a short space of time, a great deal has been achieved, including:

  • Recruitment of 16 parent mentors and working parents (fathers, mothers, adopting parents, parents of a child with a disability), and not just maternity leavers
  • 18 mentees
  • Workshops for mentors – effective mentoring and parent mentoring
  • 4 supervision sessions (external)
  • Workshop for mentees
  • Feedback sessions with all mentors across pilot
  • Captured the ‘father experience’ and compared it with the ‘mother experience’

In a separate but related initiative, SBS has a parent network, where parents of children (all ages) come together to support one another in parenting. Sessions are typically over lunchtime, and sometimes feature a speaker, such as a senior leader who’s also a parent, talking about their challenges.

It’s still early, however, to understand the long-term impact on aspects such as talent retention, but evaluation has highlighted very positive impacts already. Mentees have described the support as ‘vital’ and ‘crucial’ during challenging periods of their lives.

Some spoke of their confidence being boosted and of having an outlet to say what they could not say to their partners without feeling they were being unsupportive. The group of parent mentors have formed as a mutually supportive group, sharing ideas and best practice.

In addition to its award in The Sunday Times 25 Best Big Companies To Work For, SBS won a special award for Learning and Development as a result of the range of experiences it provides.

 

About the authors

  • Nicki Seignot is an established coach, mentor and working parent, and the co-author of the first business book on parental mentoring, Mentoring New Parents at Work (Routledge, 2017). She is also the founder of The Parent Mentor, an independent consultancy which works within organisations to develop internal mentoring programmes in support of returning talent
  • Dr Tim Spackman is an experienced internal coach, leader and organisation development practitioner. He’s the head of organisation development at Skipton Building Society, having previously worked at Barclays, among others. Accredited by EMCC as a senior practitioner, he holds post-graduate and doctorate qualifications in coaching and has been published in the Gower Handbook of Leadership and Management Development (Routledge, 2010)