There is a version of stepping up that looks clean from the outside. You get the title, you get the expanded remit, you get the slightly larger corner of the open plan office. People congratulate you. You smile and say something appropriately modest about being excited for the challenge ahead.
And then the door closes, and you realise that nobody has actually told you how to do this.
I have sat in that moment more than once. The shift from senior practitioner to service lead is not, in my experience, primarily a technical transition. You are not suddenly required to know a different body of knowledge. What changes is everything else: the relationships, the scope of accountability, the way others read your behaviour, and the quiet, disorienting process of working out who you are now that your professional identity has shifted. That is not something a job description prepares you for. It is something you have to navigate, often in real time, and ideally with someone alongside you who has done it before.
That is what mentoring, done well, can be.
The transition nobody names
When people talk about career development, they tend to focus on the visible markers: qualifications, promotions, performance ratings, the next grade on the pay scale. What gets discussed less honestly is the psychological and relational adjustment that comes with each significant step up. Especially the first one that puts you in genuine service leadership territory, where you are no longer primarily accountable for your own outputs but for the conditions in which others can do their best work.
That is a fundamentally different kind of job, even if the title does not shout it.
In my own journey, one of the things I underestimated early on was how much of leadership is about positioning. Not in a political sense, but in a perceptual one. Where you are standing determines what you can see. A leader who spends most of their time in meetings, behind a desk, reviewing dashboards, will have a genuinely different picture of their service than one who is regularly visible in the places where the actual work happens. Neither view is wrong. But relying on only one is a limitation that tends to compound quietly over time.
I found that the most useful thing any mentor did for me early in my leadership career was not give me answers. It was ask me where I had been that week. Not which meetings I had attended, but where I had actually been. Who had I spoken to? What had I heard that surprised me? What had I noticed that I would not have noticed from further away?
The most useful thing any mentor did for me was not give me answers. It was ask me where I had been that week.
That single line of questioning, repeated over months, changed how I thought about leadership as a practice rather than a status.
What mentoring is, and what it is not
There is still a tendency, even among experienced people professionals, to conflate mentoring with coaching or to treat it as a softer version of line management. It is neither. Good mentoring is a distinctive relationship built on experience-sharing, honest reflection, and the willingness of a more experienced practitioner to say: here is what I have learned, here is what I got wrong, here is how I would approach it if I were doing it again.
Professor David Clutterbuck, whose work on developmental mentoring has shaped how many organisations understand the practice, has long argued that the defining feature of effective mentoring is reciprocal learning: the mentor is not simply a repository of wisdom but an active thinking partner who grows through the relationship too. That framing matters, because it shifts mentoring away from a transactional model where the mentee extracts knowledge, and toward something more genuinely developmental on both sides.
That last part matters more than people realise. The willingness of a mentor to be honest about failure and uncertainty is often the thing that makes the relationship genuinely useful. A mentor who presents their career as a sequence of well-managed wins is not very helpful. A mentor who says, “I handled that badly and here is what I understood later that I did not understand at the time” is invaluable. It gives the mentee permission to be imperfect and helps them develop the reflective habit that will serve them far longer than any single piece of advice.
This is particularly important for people stepping into roles that are new in scope or seniority. The learning curve in those situations is steep, and the social dynamics can make it hard to ask questions openly. You are expected to project competence. A good mentor is the person with whom you do not have to do that. You can say: I am finding this harder than I expected. I do not know how to handle this situation. I am not sure I made the right call last week. And they can engage with that honestly, without it affecting your professional standing or theirs.
The specific challenges of stepping up
Not all mentoring is the same, and the kind of mentoring that is most useful to someone who has just been promoted into a significantly more senior role is worth thinking about carefully. In my experience, there are a few recurring challenges that tend to surface in that first year, and that a well-matched mentor can help with in ways that almost nothing else can.
The first is the relationship recalibration that comes with internal promotion. If you have been promoted from within a team or peer group, you carry the weight of prior relationships into your new role. Some colleagues will adjust seamlessly. Others will find it difficult, and a few may actively resist your authority, consciously or otherwise. A mentor who has navigated this transition can help you think through it without the panic of someone experiencing it for the first time. They can help you distinguish between the adjustment that is normal and temporary and the dynamics that need to be addressed directly.
The second is the tendency to over-manage. New leaders, particularly those who came up through practitioner roles and take pride in technical expertise, often struggle to step back sufficiently. There is a pull toward staying close to the work, solving problems that belong to your team, being the person with the answer. The cost of that, over time, is significant: it stifles your team’s development, it erodes their accountability, and it keeps you permanently in execution mode when your role increasingly requires strategic thinking. A mentor can name that pattern in a way that feels less like criticism and more like recognition.
The third is learning to hold complexity without resolution. Senior leadership regularly involves situations with no clean answer, competing legitimate interests, and decisions that will leave someone unhappy regardless of what you choose. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset is relevant here: the leaders who navigate ambiguity most effectively tend to be those who treat uncertainty as information rather than failure, and who stay curious about what a difficult situation might be telling them rather than retreating into fixed positions. Mentoring can actively cultivate that orientation, particularly when the mentor models it in how they approach the conversation itself.
The leaders who navigate ambiguity most effectively tend to be those who treat uncertainty as information rather than failure, and who stay curious about what a difficult situation might be telling them.
What makes the difference in a mentoring relationship
I have been mentored and I mentor others, and the relationships that have mattered most share a few things in common that I think are worth naming.
Psychological safety is foundational. If you cannot be honest in a mentoring conversation, you are having a different conversation. That safety is created partly through explicit expectation-setting at the outset and sustained through consistency. A mentor who is warm in one session and transactional in the next, or who breaks confidentiality once, will not get your genuine questions. The container has to hold.
Structure matters more than people expect. Open-ended mentoring with no agenda and no agreed goals tends to drift into pleasant professional chat. The most useful mentoring relationships I have experienced or observed had some shared framework: agreed focus areas, a rhythm of review, and some explicit commitment to stretching the mentee beyond their current comfort zone. That does not mean rigidity. It means intentionality.
And the match matters enormously. A mentor whose background shares enough with yours to generate genuine insight, but who is sufficiently outside your immediate context to offer perspective rather than just confirmation, is rare and worth seeking out deliberately. There is real value in being mentored by someone who does not see your organisation, sector, or function the same way you do. It expands the frame in ways that a like-for-like match rarely achieves.
For those new to leadership: a few things worth knowing
If you are in the early stages of a leadership role, particularly one that represents a real step up in scope or seniority, here is what I would want someone to have said to me more clearly at the start.
The discomfort you feel is probably appropriate. Impostor experience is real, but it is also worth distinguishing from the legitimate uncertainty of being genuinely new to something. Some of what you are feeling is not impostor syndrome; it is simply the sensation of a steep learning curve. That is not a problem. It is the territory.
Your team is watching how you treat them under pressure. The version of yourself that shows up when things are difficult is the version that will define your leadership reputation. Not the strategy presentation, not the away day, not the well-worded email. How you behave when a project is failing, when you are under scrutiny, when you are not sure what to do next. Those moments are the ones people remember.
And find someone who has done this before, not someone who will tell you what you want to hear. A mentor who challenges you, who asks the questions you have been avoiding, who tells you honestly when they think you have called something wrong, is worth far more than ten conversations with someone who reflects your own assumptions back at you.
For organisations and people functions
There is a broader point here that sits within the remit of anyone leading a people function or an L&D agenda. Organisations consistently underinvest in the transition support available to newly appointed leaders, particularly at the first significant step up. The induction exists. The training programme, if it exists at all, covers the compliance essentials. And then theperson is largely left to navigate the relational, psychological, and strategic dimensions of their new role alone.
That is a significant and largely avoidable cost. The leaders who struggle in their first twelve months in a new seniority band do not usually struggle because they lack technical competence. They struggle because they have not yet developed the relational authority, the self-awareness, or the strategic habits that the role demands. Structured mentoring, alongside good line management, can accelerate that development meaningfully.
It is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.
Where to find mentoring support
If you are looking for a mentor, or looking to establish mentoring provision within your organisation, the infrastructure already exists in more places than many practitioners realise. You do not need to start from scratch.
Places worth exploring
- CIPD local branches – Most, if not all, CIPD branches run their own mentoring schemes, pairing members at different career stages. If you are a CIPD member and have not explored what your local branch offers, it is worth a conversation. The quality varies by region, but the intent is consistent: connecting practitioners who want to develop with those who have relevant experience to share.
- OD networks – Across NHS regions, OD practitioner networks offer informal peer support and, in a number of cases, more structured mentoring connections. If you work in or alongside the NHS, these networks are often the most direct route to finding someone who understands the specific texture of leading in a complex, politically sensitive public service environment.
- NHS Leadership Academy (regional offer) – The NHS Leadership Academy runs formal leadership and mentoring programmes at national and regional level, including the Edward Jenner, Mary Seacole, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson programmes, each of which incorporates mentoring as a core element. If you are in a leadership role in the NHS and have not yet accessed what your regional academy offers, it is worth reviewing what is currently available.
- Your own organisation – Many NHS trusts and larger public sector employers have internal mentoring schemes, often sitting within their OD or talent offer. If yours does not, that is a gap worth naming, and an argument worth making. The evidence base for mentoring as a retention and development intervention is strong.
- Sector and professional networks, Regional HR and OD networks, senior people network forums such as the Northern Senior People Network, and cross-sector leadership communities can all be sources of mentoring connection, particularly for those in standalone or generalist roles where sector-specific internal matching is limited.
The common thread across all of these is that mentoring works best when it is intentional. Knowing broadly that support exists is not the same as actively seeking it, agreeing a structure, and committing to the relationship. That last step is the one that most people delay, and often the one that would have made the most difference earlier.
Hashim Din Chartered FCIPD is the founder of Avant People, an independent thought leadership and OD/People consultancy working at the intersection of organisational development, people strategy, and ethical people practice. He offers mentoring to senior HR and OD practitioners on a selective basis. If you are considering making a significant step in your career and want to think it through with someone who has navigated similar territory, you are welcome to get in touch.