Nucleus’ former head of account management, Amira Norris, and her wife, Julie Goddard, have spent the past five months developing a ‘mentor standard’ for the financial services industry.
The standard is made up of two CPD-accredited, paid-for courses, one of which has been designed for mentors and the other for mentees.
The two are running trials with beta users now. The mentee course is set to go live along with an online forum on August 15, and the mentor course sometime in September.
There’s a gap where people are coming into the industry but they’re not progressing. They get stuck.Amira Norris, The Mentor StandardThe idea is to help both individuals looking for a mentor in need of pin-pointing a desired outcome, and to help mentors offer more value to those they guide.
There will also be fortnightly live office hours where people can share problems they are having, and get support from Norris and Goddard.
Norris sold her chartered financial planner business in 2016. She then joined Nucleus, where she worked for five years before leaving in April.
She is currently on garden leave and seeing out her restrictive covenant until the end of September.
“I’ve always been a mentor or a mentee,” she told FTAdviser. “I mentored throughout all my time at Nucleus.
Norris said there’s a gap where people are coming into the industry but they’re not progressing. “They get stuck,” she said. “Want to help these people.”
She added: “I thought: If I’m going to have eight months off, I’ve got to do something useful with this. It’s grown arms and legs, and now we have a mentor standard.”
Norris said she was lucky to have Goddard by her side to develop the standard. “Julie has effectively been my coach,” she said.
We’ve tried to think about every scenario.Julie Goddard, The Mentor StandardGoddard, who previously worked for Ofsted, left education in 2014 to become a business psychologist. She has now become a leadership coach primarily for women in finance.
Structured mentoring has not traditionally been a standard feature in the majority of workplaces. While 76 per cent of people think mentoring is good, a significantly lesser 37 per cent have one, according to research by Illinois University Olivet Nazarene in 2019.
“There’s a lot of material out there about mentoring reprinted,” said Goddard. “There are several myths. For example, that mentors will help with your direction or goals, when actually that’s a waste of mentors’ time.
“You can do that bit yourself. You should be using a mentor to overcome a specific challenge or goal, and doesn’t have to be long-term - for example, filling a skill gap.”
The mentor standard is not just an altruistic project for Norris and Goddard. They highlighted how employees are six times more likely to get a promotion if they’re mentoring, citing research from back in 2006 conducted by technology firm Sun Microsystems, now owned by Oracle.
Goddard said a big part of the mentor course is the safeguarding checklist, which the two designed in order to make more men feel comfortable mentoring women.
At the end of the courses, people are supposed to feel better equipped - knowing what they want out of a mentor and what the benefits are of being a good mentor.
“We’ve tried to think about every scenario,” said Goddard. “From ‘I don’t know where to start’, all the way to ‘I have a bad mentor, how do I challenge that and not take their advice onboard?’”
“We don’t want to alienate people, so this standard can help avoid poor matching,” Norris added.
Once live, people will be able to access the course via a website-based portal. The two said there will be an entry-level fee for each course.
The organisation also accredits mentorship programmes within the financial services sector for companies which can "robustly evidence" they meet eight separate standards set by the duo covering leadership, support and strategic improvements.
ruby.hinchliffe@ft.com
