Leading Financial Services Group Supports Senior Leaders Through Mentorship

Manulife is a leading international financial services group that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. Manulife operates primarily as John Hancock in the United States and Manulife elsewhere, including at their headquarters in Canada and global offices across Europe and Asia. Manulife provides financial advice, insurance, as well as wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups and institutions.

The Challenge

To support Manulife’s most senior leaders as they grow into more advanced executive roles, through an exclusive mentoring program aimed to role model Manulife’s core values and leadership behaviours.

Pollinate Approach

In 2016 Pollinate worked with Manulife to create targeted mentoring education that spanned multiple countries and multiple languages, including English, French Canadian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Bahasa, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai.
In 2017, Pollinate co-created the Senior Leader Development Program mentoring program. With an intake designed around key leadership behaviours, Pollinate facilitated the mentor matching based on strategic and psychometric criteria.
A balance of live and self-managed mentoring education content was provided alongside key company artifacts to guide and support the mentoring process.
Ran 3 programs over 4 years that provided mentees the ability to set specific learning goals and work toward them over several months with the benefit of having a mentor to support, adjust and speak to the goals.
A light set of metrics to measure how the pairs are doing and gather feedback from program participants have been used to modify and expand the program.

Highlights

100% of survey respondents felt the program was valuable

100% of survey respondents made progress on goals

100% of survey respondents found resources helpful

Results

Provided the opportunity for mentees to sustain and deepen leadership learning following the program experience.
Created a “microclimate” within mentoring pairs and groups, which enabled participants to sustain learning and keep their learning goals top of mind while deeply exploring questions and style challenges and taking supported risks.
Increased mentees’ understanding of the organizational context at the executive level - understanding the bigger picture for the organization and what matters most according to the next-level leaders' priorities.
Generated additional connections in each leader’s network.
Both verbal reports and the final program evaluation from the Mentoring Program show people made measurable gains on their goals through the program.
Produced recommendations for the 2020 Mentoring program and beyond.

Client Testimonials

“At a time when many leaders are being asked to take on more risk and get more comfortable with uncertainty, the benefit of having ready access to a formal mentor has never been greater. What’s wonderful to see is how the simple process of matching people together generates such rich and supportive discussion.”

Suzie Custerson

Head of Global Leadership Development Programs – Talent Management at Manulife

“Good opportunity to share the global practice and to allow my mentee to ask open questions.”

Mentor

“I’m very fortunate to have them as my mentor. One can really feel their genuine concern for me to improve and they really care about how I progress and is very supportive. I’ve learned a lot from them.”

Mentee

Want To Know More?

Ask us about our programs, services, tools, implementation, pricing or anything else: