Being customer-obsessed starts with understanding people. Not just the customers we serve, but the colleagues we work alongside every day. That’s why we introduced reciprocal mentoring.
At its simplest, reciprocal mentoring creates space for honest conversations. Two colleagues come together to talk about work and life without titles getting in the way. There’s no leader and no learner, just two people trying to understand each other a little better.
When we piloted it for the first time, with Ellie and Soyab, those conversations didn’t shy away from the tricky stuff. They shared what their days really look like, how decisions land in practice, what customers worry about and what weighs on them too. It opened up perspectives that are easy to miss when you’re focused on your own responsibilities.
Ellie sits on our Board as a Non-Executive Director, chairs our Governance and People committee and is a member of our Audit and Risk committee. Much of her role is focused on strategy, people and long-term decisions, so she joined reciprocal mentoring to better understand how those decisions feel on the ground.
Soyab is a Money and Benefit Coach. He meets customers face to face every week, helping them navigate money, benefits and everything that comes with it. He signed up because he wanted to bring that lived experience into the room and help shape conversations at a different level.
From the start, they agreed to drop the filter. Nothing was off limits. They talked about culture, confidence, pressure and belonging, and explored how decisions made at the top can land in ways no one expected. And of course they laughed a lot along the way!
Munir, our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead, summed it up well, he said, reciprocal mentoring gives senior leaders “an understanding and perspective of something they’ve not thought about before.” And that’s really the point. We can’t design better services without understanding the people who use them and the people who deliver them.
For Ellie, the experience brought a clearer view of our culture. She spoke about seeing “differences in culture” in a new light and now pays closer attention to what might sit behind customer satisfaction scores. And for Soyab, the value was in having honest and open conversations, particularly around Equality and Diversity and feeling listened to. He talked about “understanding, sharing and developing” together, and how that made our customer-obsessed goals feel more real and less like something written in a strategy document.
By the end, they both described it as a genuinely positive experience that helped them see the world through someone else’s eyes. If you’d like to see what that looked like in practice, we filmed some of their time together👇
Our second group has already started, and we’re excited to see where the conversations go next.