Celebrating a decade of cross-company mentoring
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the 30% Club cross-company mentoring programmes delivered by Moving Ahead – my social impact organisation which aims to revolutionise the world’s workplaces by advancing diversity, equity and inclusion.
The 30% Club campaign was founded by Dame Helena Morrissey in 2010, when just 12.5% of board members were women. Its chief aim was – and still is – to achieve a minimum of 30% women on FTSE 100 boards. It’s since evolved into a global mission, represented in multiple countries and regions worldwide with more than 700 companies participating. And it is, of course, seriously needed.
Helena’s vision was to create impact at scale. I am delighted to say this is exactly what we’re doing; our cross-company mentoring programmes are the largest in the world. The numbers and names speak for themselves. We’ve built an incredible community, with close to 16,000 mentees, across 50 countries, spanning 30 sectors. We’ve worked with more than 700 organisations too; from Saga to HSBC, Rolls-Royce, Bupa, Google, BBC, JP Morgan, the Armed Forces, Mastercard, EY, Deloitte, and the London Stock Exchange – who are also hosting today’s 10th anniversary celebration.
We live in an era in which 39% of labour is unvalued, unpaid or unrecognised. And in 56% of countries, it is women who are more likely to be unpaid. If the Covid pandemic has only amplified and heightened these existing inequalities, the World Economic Foundation estimates it will take 257 years to close the “economic participation and opportunity” gap. For those who sit at the intersections of gender and other minority groups, including women from minority ethnicities, with disabilities or those of trans status, this may take even longer.
Given this, I am so proud of what the 30% Club and Moving Ahead have achieved together in the decade since the cross-company scheme was founded. A large part of that has been down to mentoring, a core lever in how we are building the executive pipeline and supporting women’s acceleration to the board. There’s been a lot of noise about diversity, equity and inclusion in the past few years, and if our mission at Moving Ahead was to revolutionise the world’s workplaces to make them more equitable, inclusive and diverse, we have demonstrably proved that mentoring can provide a roadmap to achieve this.
I’m passionate about mentoring. I believe it is an enormous catalyst for change. As a mentoring specialist, I’ve personally led more than 500 mentoring programmes – and been the recipient of mentoring myself from the likes of Ann Cairns, global chair of the 30% Club and executive vice chair of Mastercard, and Dame Helena Morrissey herself, as well as Holiday Philips and Michael Cole-Fontayn, former chairman at BNY Mellon. And over the past decade, I’ve come to truly understand its transformative power.
Put simply, our cross-company mentoring programmes really work. And we know this, because we regularly monitor their impact through surveys administered at four stages across our nine-month programmes, and by manually following up over longer time periods.
It has been amazing to see mentees becoming so empowered, resourceful and confident through our programmes. I’m so grateful to all the companies and our amazing mentors and mentees, who’ve shown this is working. Since we launched, I’ve heard so many stories of women feeling empowered, more resourceful – and really leaning in.
MOVING UP
Our 30% Club cross-company mentoring programmes also get people promoted: three years after the 2018 launch of our Mission Gender Equity programme, 47% of our mentees secured at least one promotion. Over a similar timescale, 53% of our Mission Include 2019 cohort were also promoted. Normally, we’d expect to see around 30% of this group being promoted if they hadn't been involved with the programme.
And mentoring is transformative for our mentors too: mentors tell me they no longer feel like bystanders. Instead, they can actively support and champion diverse talent and in the process, truly learn about the lived experiences of others. Moving Ahead’s Mission Gender Equity programme, for example, helps men and women walk in one another’s shoes – which helps men, especially, understand women’s lived experiences and build up their confidence.
GAME CHANGING
In the 10 years since the 30% Club was launched, there’s been some progress: 20% of boardroom seats are now held by women, and within the C-suite, women make up 5% of CEOs and 16% of CFOs. This isn’t a silver bullet, but it's a start. Little by little, our 30% Club programmes are changing hearts and minds – and crucially, building better representation in senior teams all over the world.
Moving Ahead may have started out with the focus on gender, but it has rightly evolved to support diverse talent from all under-represented groups. We launched Mission Include two years ago, co-founded by Rupal Kantaria and in May we kicked off our first Leaders for Race Equity programme in collaboration with Lord Karan Bilimoria and the CBI’s Change the Race Ratio campaign and the 30% Club. It’s a structured CEO cross-company programme designed to help achieve targets for greater racial and ethnic diversity at the board, ExCo and ExCo minus one levels of Britain’s FTSE 350 companies. We are so proud to have embarked on this fantastic mission and are looking forward to the future.
There is a lot of work to do to achieve true diversity, equity and inclusion. This week we are pausing to celebrate the success and impact of our first decade, and to swap thoughts and ideas, challenge ourselves and create a vision for the next 10 years. Please join us today in celebrating the power of mentoring and drop me a line if you want to hear more about the programme. As Oprah Winfrey once said, “a mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” Pretty powerful, isn’t it?