Culture is essentially the set of beliefs, assumptions and environmental cues that guides employees/volunteers to behave a certain way, both at a conscious and an unconscious level.

While he did move up the ranks steadily, usually Byron was the second in command. An ethical challenge meant the top leader had to leave, and now Byron was being considered for the top job, driving margins, growth, and impacting lives.

It’s easy to believe that confidence is in the mind - it is the way you look at things, even yourself. It’s easy to believe that confidence is based on how you think the world works, your assumptions and your stereotypes.

Your skills and expertise are the rucksack you have built up as a result of your education, your work experience and your life experience. This may be specialist knowledge that made you a subject matter expert, it might be technical skills you learnt lets say in marketing or skills you learnt as a people manager.

A mentoring relationship starts with an implicit power context. The mentor, who usually brings more work and life experience, is assumed to have the upper hand. Mentors may also find themselves in the situation that a mentee is seeking lots of advice, and it might seem easy to be the problem solver. They help mentees critically think about goals, challenge their decisions or their avoidance of a decision.

Mentoring relationships accelerate self discovery, make you available for opportunities that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed and make you future ready in our ever changing reality. For many, signing up to be a mentor or to be a mentee is akin to getting on the bus. Women accomplish amazing things when they support each other; when we become interdependent rather than compete.

A mentor who’s also a leader in the organization where the mentee works, consciously or less consciously follows organizational imperatives and is unable to see the mentee as different from the organization’s system.

With networking and deepening breadth of connections, it opens a plethora of opportunities for women. So many women that I know today want to come back to the compensated working world. Some are keen to join as volunteers first. It’s like dipping your elbow into the water to check if it’s the right temperature for the baby.

Most organizations have politically charged undertones and revealing your whole self can potentially be a career-limiting move for both sides. This becomes even more convoluted when the department is a “soft” function for e.g. the Human Resources or HR, where reliance on technical skills doesn’t get you very far up the ladder.

Build your sense of safety before you approach the conversation- This will help you participate in the conversation and not be a spectator. To experience the conversation and what it can mean for you- it makes sense to substantiate what you are asking for and why. List down your achievements, wins, tenure, soft skill wins, setbacks over the course of the last couple of years.

Your mentor works as your yardstick, an experienced professional who’s been there and done that. The mentorship serves as a progressive route between individual doubts, organisational needs, internal gratification and external customer service.

Mentors see things in you that you don’t see in yourself, and ones removed from your immediate context, see it better as they have a clearer vision which is untainted by organizational reality.

Women at the rungs have very few role models to look up to. The very few at the top won’t have the time to reach out and offer mentorship. It’s up to the rungs to seek it themselves. Don't wait for things to happen, go out, take initiative, ask for mentorship.

Most organizations have politically charged undertones and revealing your whole self can potentially be a career-limiting move for both sides. This becomes even more convoluted when the department is a “soft” function for e.g. the Human Resources or HR, where reliance on technical skills doesn’t get you very far up the ladder.

Build your sense of safety before you approach the conversation- This will help you participate in the conversation and not be a spectator. To experience the conversation and what it can mean for you- it makes sense to substantiate what you are asking for and why.

We need many mentors in our lifetime. Some help us with functional skills relevant to specific projects and assignments, others we can speak about our challenges to balance our professional and personal lives. Thrive, women to women mentoring, possibly falls more in the later category.

A lot of women that I meet in the way of my work and also personally are so driven in what they do that sometimes I wonder what are the “man”made shackles that people talk of, or the glass ceiling. Of course I do understand the pay gap, the monetisation of gender differences, the politicality of race and ethnicity.

The relationship between women is like a really complex biryani. It has so many ingredients, it needs to be marinated, to be cooked well, to be served with love, to be appreciated for all the effort. It is nuanced, flavoured differently at each bite. It makes you feel full in a way very few things do in life- and I say this knowing that there are many hats that women wear.

The most efficient leaders make efforts to understand the competencies and communication styles of people around them. When time comes, they know who to approach to help convince the concerned team member(s).

Mentoring can be an under-recognized exercise. It usually doesn’t have a commercial but an altruistic purpose for most. Generosity is at its foundation - yet you need to be crystal clear about the value you add.