The most useful mentoring relationships rarely come from someone in your own team, your own function, or even your own industry. Distance is what makes a mentor valuable, because it removes the bias that comes from shared context and forces both people to listen more carefully.
That is the pattern that emerges from a recent Mentoring Unlocked conversation between Maud Lindley, founder of Serendis Leadership and MentorKey, and Blair Wark, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Country Officer for RBC Asia Pacific. Blair has mentored extensively through Serendis’ Women in Banking and Finance program, and his reflections offer a grounded view of what makes mentoring work, and why cognitive diversity sits at the centre of it.
Distance Is What Makes a Mentor Valuable
When someone is close to you in role or organisation, they carry bias about what they think the right answer is. A mentor with genuine distance from your world has no stake in the outcome and no fixed view of what you should do next, so they listen differently and ask questions you would not think to ask yourself.
Blair described this directly when reflecting on his own experience as a mentee. People close to him in role often already had a view on what he should do. People further removed, including internal and external contacts built over his career at RBC, brought something else: a perspective shaped by a completely different set of experiences.
One of his most consistent sources of counsel has been his wife, a photographer with no connection to banking or finance. Her value as a sounding board comes precisely from that distance. She brings emotional intelligence and a way of thinking that has nothing to do with financial services, which means she helps him see career decisions from an angle he would not reach on his own.
Cognitive Diversity Belongs in Mentoring Design, Not Just Talent Strategy
Organisations increasingly talk about cognitive diversity when building teams. Blair applies the same principle to how his own leadership team operates, and to how mentoring relationships are best matched.
Leading finance and operations across Sydney, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan, Blair works with a team that is culturally diverse by geography, and also cognitively diverse in how people think, decide, and solve problems based on their backgrounds and life experience. Getting the best from that team, he explained, means learning how to draw out each person’s strengths individually and as a collective, rather than expecting everyone to operate the same way.
This is also, in his view, what makes Serendis’ Women in Banking and Finance program effective. Mentors and mentees are deliberately paired across different organisations and often across different roles within the same industry. That structure creates a genuine difference in perspective, rather than pairing people who already think alike.
A short comparison illustrates the difference in what each type of relationship tends to offer.
Neither approach is wrong. But Blair’s experience points to why organisations building mentoring programs should design for distance rather than convenience, and resist the instinct to match people who look and think alike.
The Best Mentors Ask Rather Than Tell
Asked whether he follows a particular method across the many mentees he has worked with, Blair was clear that there is no fixed formula. Every mentee arrives with a different challenge: one wanted the confidence to leave her organisation and pursue a new role, another wanted to prepare for an internal promotion, and others simply needed space to work out what they wanted from their career at all.
What stayed consistent across every relationship was the discipline of withholding the answer. Blair described his approach as leading a mentee toward their own conclusion through questions and prompts, rather than directing them toward his. Only occasionally, when a mentee is truly stuck, does he offer an idea directly, and even then he frames it as a question rather than an instruction.
This approach requires reading the conversation as it happens. In practice, it looks like:
1. Asking whether the mentee has considered other options before offering a view
2. Continuing to prompt and lead when the first question does not land
3. Offering a specific idea only when needed, and framing it as “would this work for you?” rather than a directive
The outcome is a mentee who arrives at a decision they own, rather than one they were told to make.
Building Confidence Is a Process, Not a Conversation
Several of Blair’s mentoring relationships centred on building confidence ahead of a stretch opportunity, most notably supporting a mentee through a formal internal promotion process. He described working through it over several months, using mock interviews and structured preparation to help her recognise she already had most of what the role required.
His underlying observation is a useful one for any organisation designing development conversations: most people preparing for a stretch role already have around eighty per cent of the required skills and are preoccupied with the twenty per cent they lack. Organisations promoting internally are rarely looking for someone who can already do the job perfectly. They are looking for someone ready to be challenged and to grow into it.
A mentor’s role in that moment is to help the mentee reframe the gap. Rather than treating missing skills as a disqualifier, the conversation shifts to acknowledging them honestly while leaning into existing strengths, and being ready to say plainly what support will be needed to close the gap once the mentee is in the role.
Mentoring Only Works When People Choose It
Asked for his single most important recommendation to organisations building mentoring programs, Blair did not point to structure or process, he pointed to willingness. Programs that assign fifty mentors and fifty mentees because a target number needs to be met tend to fail, in his experience, because the relationship was never chosen by either party.
Mentoring programs succeed when participation is fully voluntary on both sides. That single design choice matters more than the sophistication of the matching process or the length of the program.
The Skill Mentoring Teaches That Nothing Else Does
Asked what mentoring builds in a leader that no formal leadership program can replicate, Blair’s answer was immediate: listening. He meant the discipline of listening closely enough to understand what someone is actually working through, rather than what you assume they are working through.
He was candid that this is a skill still in progress for him personally, and that it applies well beyond formal mentoring relationships, shaping how leaders show up in work relationships and at home. It is also, notably, a skill that tends to develop faster in the mentor than in a classroom, because a live conversation with a real person creates an immediate cost for not listening well.
Blair also made a point that many senior leaders in mentoring programs echo: he frequently learns as much from his mentees as they learn from him, hearing directly from talented people in different organisations and roles gives him a live view into perspectives he would not otherwise encounter.
The value in mentoring comes largely from distance and difference. Mentors furthest from a mentee’s own world tend to carry the least bias, which is why cognitive diversity in how mentors and mentees are matched matters as much as diversity in any other talent process. Mentoring programs succeed when people choose to be involved, and the discipline of listening that mentoring builds is one of the few leadership skills that develops faster through real relationships than through any formal program.
FAQs
Why does cognitive diversity matter in mentor matching?
A mentor whose thinking, background and industry context differ from the mentee’s brings fewer assumptions about the “right” answer. That distance reduces bias and encourages more independent, considered guidance than a mentor who shares the mentee’s context.
Should mentoring programs assign mentors and mentees, or let people choose?
Programs built on mandated numbers of pairings tend to be far less impactful. Mentoring works best when both the mentor and the mentee actively choose to be part of the relationship, rather than being assigned to fill a target.
What is the most common mistake mentors make?
Giving advice too early. The most effective mentors prompt and question before they suggest, and only offer a direct idea when a mentee is truly stuck, framing it as a question rather than an instruction.
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At MentorKey, we believe that mentoring, coaching and sponsorship programs can play a powerful role in strengthening these leadership conversations. By creating structured spaces for reflection and dialogue, organisations can help their people build the clarity, confidence and capability needed to lead well.
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