Forget the traditional image of mentoring. Developing PIA’s next generation of leaders may start with something much simpler: sharing what you know when it matters. The word mentor likely brings familiar pictures to mind: a seasoned professional working with a newer employee, meeting regularly, dispensing career advice and helping chart a path forward.
There’s nothing wrong with that kind of relationship. In fact, many successful insurance professionals can point to someone who played exactly that role in their careers. But it’s time to expand the definition. Mentoring doesn’t always require a formal program, a long-term commitment or someone who carries the title mentor.
What if every PIA member could be a mentor? Consider an agency owner who explains the thinking behind a difficult business decision, or an underwriter who takes an extra five minutes to explain why a risk doesn’t fit. A producer may invite a newer employee to sit in on a client meeting and a carrier representative can make an introduction to someone a new agent wants to meet. A mentor can be a CSR who shares something learned through years of handling clients or a technology professional who helps someone understand how AI is changing the work.
These are all mentors in the moment: people who have knowledge, perspective, experience or connections that can help an ascending professional take the next step.
Call it mentoring—with a glow up
The traditional idea of mentorship can feel surprisingly formal for today’s workplace. New thinking about mentorship challenges that model. Mentoring is most effective when it’s reciprocal vs. a one-way transfer of wisdom. There’s also a big difference between having a mentoring program and creating a mentoring culture, one in which developing others becomes part of how people work together, whether or not they are participating in a formal program.
When it comes to PIA, which already includes agency owners, producers, CSRs, carrier executives and technology providers, the opportunity is less about identifying who qualifies to be a mentor and more about helping everyone recognize the moments when they can be one.
Winning@Work, a resource from PIA’s National Carrier Council and Ascending Leaders Council, is launching its next edition next month. It describes how mentoring can happen in the flow of actual work by helping newer professionals understand what is happening and why.
Here are three ways everyone in the insurance industry—no matter your role or level of experience—can become a mentor in the moment to someone just starting out.
#1: Give them something they can’t learn on ChatGPT. There is plenty a new insurance professional can learn from a course, a manual, a carrier website and by asking AI. Experience and context are different. Most insurance professionals accumulate thousands of small lessons that rarely appear in a training manual. For example, they know when an underwriter’s question is signaling a larger concern. They recognize when a client needs a phone call instead of another email or why one carrier relationship needs to be handled differently from another. Most have made mistakes and learned from them. And much of that knowledge becomes so instinctive that experienced professionals may not realize how valuable it is. Mentors in the moment make that thinking visible.
#2: Make the connection. One of the most important things a mentor can provide beyond advice is exposure. Overall, 84% of young adults who had been mentored credited mentors with opening doors to opportunities they hadn’t known existed, according to a national survey of 1,000 Gen Zs conducted by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and The Harris Poll.
That idea is particularly applicable to the insurance industry. Many people enter the insurance business knowing very little about how large it really is. They often understand only their particular job, but don’t know about all the other roles and opportunities.
Winning@Work points to opportunities across sales, account management, service, marketing, operations, technology and leadership, and career paths that cross agencies, carriers, MGAs, brokers and service providers. PIA members can help make those possibilities visible by inviting an ascending professional into a meeting they normally wouldn’t attend or bringing someone to a PIA event.
#3. Ask before giving the answer. Mentoring is often associated with advice. But a mentor in the moment doesn’t always need to have an answer and sometimes a well-timed question is more useful. This is also where the idea of reciprocal mentoring becomes important. Ascending professionals bring their own experiences and perspectives. They may think differently about technology, communication, customer expectations and the workplace itself. The objective isn’t to turn the next generation into a replica of the current one.
Mentoring works in both directions: the experienced professional can share how something has worked in the past while remaining curious about how the other person might experience it differently. For an industry navigating AI, changing customer expectations, new ways of working and a generational transition, that exchange can be valuable on both sides.
This isn’t just a theory about what the next generation might want. PIA’s Winning@Work’s research, based on conversations with agency employees and owners, identified mentorship and professional growth among five issues that consistently matter to younger insurance professionals, along with culture, flexibility and technology. The research also found that smaller agencies don’t necessarily need elaborate career development programs. Stretch assignments, job shadowing, participation in meetings, industry involvement and regular conversations about growth can expose employees to new skills and career possibilities.
The idea of mentors in the moment is a focus area for the upcoming edition of Winning@Work. The online resource builds on the original research of the first Winning@Work edition and offers practical guidance about professional habits, relationships, career development and the unwritten realities of building a career in insurance.
But the idea behind mentors in the moment is bigger than a resource. PIA recently brought together a group of Ascending Leaders for two days of professional development during its Leadership Meeting. They explored topics including creating a flow state to perform at their best, marketing, communicating like a leader and thinking like a business owner.
Imagine if every PIA member approached the next meeting, conference, committee call or everyday business interaction believing they had something worth passing along.
Five ways to be a mentor in the moment
- Explain the why. Don’t just provide the answer. Share the experience and thinking behind it.
- Open the door. Invite someone into a meeting or conversation so they can see another part of the business.
- Ask the question. Find out what someone wants to learn before assuming what they need to know.
- Make the introduction. Share the network that took years to build. Connecting someone to the right person may be more valuable than anything one mentor can tell them.
- Learn something back. Ask what the ascending professional sees differently. Mentoring shouldn’t be a lecture. The strongest relationships create two-way learning.
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