The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

Steven Spielberg

The research on mentoring is clear: Those who are mentored out-earn and outperform those who are not. Organizations that invest in mentoring benefit from higher productivity and greater loyalty.

Yet, despite 76% of people understanding the benefits of having a mentor, only 37% of people actually have one.

In this session, Andy Lopata and Dr. Ruth Gotian will take us through ideas from their latest book “The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring.

What we’ll cover:

• How to build team of mentors to help you develop your career
• Insight into how to identify who you can support and the type of support you can offer them
• How to make a powerful long-lasting impact on the people you mentor
• Methods for navigate mentoring challenges, from disagreements about approach to a clash of personalities
• How to advocate for mentoring – encouraging others to embrace the opportunity to become mentee and mentor

Why is it important for people to learn this skill?

We achieve great things by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. Mentoring has a huge impact but is often left as an afterthought. We need to fully understand and embrace mentoring, the better we engage with mentors and mentees, the greater the difference we can make individually and collectively.

Who is this relevant for?

This session is relevant for people who have been asked to mentor others, those who are looking for support to progress their careers and anyone tasked with running mentoring programmes.

About your host:

A specialist in professional relationships and networking for 25 years, Andy Lopata was called ‘one of Europe’s leading business networking strategists’ by the Financial Times and ‘a true master of networking’ by the Independent and Forbes.com.

A very experienced international speaker and podcast host, this is Andy’s sixth book. In addition, he has been quoted in a number of other business books and regularly quoted in the international press.

Andy is a former President of the Fellows Community and a two-time Board Member of the Professional Speaking Association UK & Ireland (PSA) and a Fellow of the Learning and Performance Institute as well as a Member of the Meetings Industry Association and Association of Business Mentors. He is also one of just 32 recipients of the PSA’s top honour, the ‘Award of Excellence’.

Dr. Ruth Gotian is the Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology and former founding Assistant Dean of Mentoring and Executive Director of the Mentoring Academy at Weill Cornell Medicine. She has been hailed by the journals Nature and the Wall Street Journal, as well as Columbia University, as an expert in mentorship and leadership development and was recently recognized as one of the top 20 mentors in the world by the International Federation of Learning and Development.

In 2021, Thinkers50, dubbed the Oscars of management thinking, ranked her the #1 emerging management thinker in the world. In 2023, LinkedIn named her a top voice in mentoring. She was also a semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. In addition to publishing in top academic journals, she is a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Psychology Today. As a social-scientist, her research is about the mindset and skill set of peak performers, including Nobel Prize winners, astronauts, and Olympic champions, which she writes about in her other best-selling book, The Success Factor.