Why Mentoring Matters: A guest blog from a Finance Director at Allied Bakeries

Most talented professionals that are working hard to move up the corporate ladder, aspiring to be the financial leaders of the future, face the same concerns:

To progress, you need to accelerate your learning by continually taking on new challenges that you haven’t faced before. However, as you take on new and daunting challenges, the obvious self-doubt can set in, such as: Where do I begin? Can I really do this? What are the potential watch outs? How can I make a real success of this?

ABF Grocery Finance believe  that having a robust mentoring programme allows mentees to ask these questions in confidence with someone completely independent of the business, allowing them to accelerate their learning and face new challenges confidently.  It’s like having your own personal advisor.

So how does it work in practice?

At our organisation, all aspiring finance leaders of the future are allocated a mentor. The mentor will be a seasoned finance professional, often a finance director in one of our businesses, who is allocated to a mentee dependent upon the skills and capabilities the mentee requires. The mentee drives the frequency of the meeting and agenda allowing him or her to discuss work related issues and explore challenges to problems ‘off the record’. The mentor can ether share experiences or, via questioning - get to a solution. Ultimately, mentoring helps to nurture talented professionals by giving them the opportunity to tap into a wealth of learnt experience.

The benefits

The benefits of mentoring are not all one-sided. Being a mentor is highly rewarding; you are doing something that really matters and makes a difference to someone else’s career.  It is great to connect with talented individuals and see them grow. More often than not, you also find yourself learning from the mentee!

If you would like to learn more about ABF and our career opportunities, please visit the microsite here. 

Guest author: Mark Ward - Finance Director at Allied Milling and Baking Group.