INTHEBLACK December 2025 / January 2026 - Magazine - Page 37
Mentoring offers personalised
support that formal training often
cannot, helping individuals tackle
real-world challenges.
T
Both formal and informal mentoring
programs offer mutual benefits
for both mentor and mentee, and
can lead to lasting relationships.
he effect of being mentored by senior people
in insurance and loss adjusting still resonates
for Craig McLeod, even though it was three
decades ago.
Now the head of quality and people development
at Crawford & Company, McLeod is responsible
for designing development opportunities to attract
and retain talent within his organisation. These
opportunities include mentoring programs.
When McLeod was a 20-year-old mentee,
he entered a profession that demanded deep
insight and detailed reporting, and where learning
on the job was taken very seriously.
“Mentoring gave me the opportunity, at a young
age, to become well-qualified in loss adjusting
and to handle assignments I wouldn’t have otherwise
had the opportunity to take on,” he says.
“If I didn’t have access to development through
these mentors, and the emphasis they placed on
further learning, training and development, I would
have had far fewer opportunities. It prompted me
to leave Adelaide and move across Australia to
Sydney to advance my career.”
Ongoing training is a great development tool for
employees, McLeod says. Courses that add to one’s
professional knowledge, as well as opportunities
to work across various departments, are all beneficial.
But nothing comes close to the power of a good
mentoring relationship.
“That’s where you get traction with people, in that
one-on-one relationship where you’re dealing with
a real-life business situation and you’re bouncing
around ideas and challenging people,” he says.
“That is key — challenging people and helping
them challenge their own clarity.”
A Mentorloop industry report on the financial
sector confirms the many benefits of mentoring
in financial services. Identified outcomes include
greater career clarity, better self-esteem and sense
of belonging, stronger emotional intelligence,
more diverse perspectives and broader
professional networks.
Mentorship fosters career growth,
resilience and lifelong learning,
often shaping a professional’s
journey from an early stage.
A FRESH TAKE ON AN OLD IDEA
Mentorship is not new. In fact, it is ancient.
In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, written around
2700 years ago, the character Mentor offers guidance
and support to Telemachus, the son of Odysseus.
From that poem, the term “mentor” came to
represent an experienced, typically older person
who helps guide a younger, less experienced one.
More recently, there have been countless examples
of high-profile mentoring relationships, including author
and poet Dr Maya Angelou taking Oprah Winfrey
under her wing, Steve Jobs guiding a young Mark
Zuckerberg during the early days of Facebook (now
Meta), and designer Christian Dior helping shape
the career and success of Yves Saint Laurent.
The power of mentorship, whether in the public
sphere or elsewhere, comes from the sharing
of experience, guidance and confidence-building
competence. It is something that Lisa Sweeney,
CEO of Business in Heels, has built a following
around as she and her team connect individuals
with a passion for sharing their insight to those
with a hunger for knowledge.
“Most people with less experience in their work
are, of course, limited by their own knowledge,”
Sweeney says. “Being challenged by other people
and learning from their experiences and knowledge
will stretch and add to your thinking.”
“It is not necessarily about doing what they’ve
done, although mentoring absolutely helps
individuals to avoid repeating potentially costly
mistakes. Mentoring is about stretching people’s
thinking in a way that helps them be more innovative
and enables them to solve complex problems. It is
so valuable because it helps to fast-track people.”
GLOBAL CONNECTION
CPA Australia’s Global Mentoring Program matched
over 650 mentor–mentee pairs in 2024 alone.
Marios Pasas CPA, head of finance services and
enterprise risk at InfraBuild, is a past mentor in
that program.
THE ART OF MODERN LEADERSHIP intheblack.cpaaustralia.com.au 37
