If ever there was a story of why mentoring matters, this is one. Luke Sparkes, Managing Director of Sparkes Paraplanning Limited, shares the value in paying it forward and this story – is a must read – until the end.
Today, as I write this article, I’m heading to an awards ceremony for the PFS Paraplanner of the Year. Katie Tang, who I had mentored, has been nominated and she invited me to be there as a thank you.
I don’t know whether she’ll win. What I’ve noticed is that it matters less to me than I expected. What I keep coming back to is that she wanted me in the room. That tells me more about whether the mentoring worked than any trophy could.
People often assume mentoring is about passing on technical knowledge. In paraplanning, that part is the easiest. Pension rules, research methods and report structure can all be learned from courses, manuals and colleagues.
What takes years to pick up alone is judgement. How do you tell an adviser their recommendation has a gap without damaging the relationship? When is a case ready to go out, and when does it need another hour? How do you explain a complicated point so that a client actually understands it?
A mentor doesn’t hold secret knowledge. A mentor shortens the time it takes to learn these things, and makes the mistakes along the way cheaper.
Someone did the same for me.
Mine was a senior colleague I worked with about ten years before I moved into paraplanning, when I was in pensions administration. I’d had trainers before who were impatient, who explained something once and moved on whether I’d understood or not.
He was different. He took the time to understand how I worked and how I learned, and shaped his teaching around that. What stayed with me wasn’t any single lesson. It was the feeling that someone more experienced believed I was capable of more than I was showing.
That belief gave me the confidence to push on, and it’s the reason I’ve tried to pass on as much as I can to the people coming up behind me. In a quiet way, tonight is partly his doing too.
The best mentoring I’ve seen, and the kind I try to give, has a few habits in common.
It starts with listening before advising. It tells the truth, kindly, when work isn’t good enough yet. It hands over real responsibility before the person feels ready, and stays close enough to catch them if it goes wrong. And it lets them make their own decisions, even when you would have chosen differently.
None of that takes a great deal of time. It takes attention, which is rarer.
There’s a strange kind of debt in being helped. You can rarely repay the person who helped you. They didn’t do it for a return, and often they’ve moved on or don’t remember. The only real way to honour it is to do the same for someone else.
That is what paying it forward means in practice. It isn’t a grand gesture. It’s an hour a month with someone a few years behind you, a straight answer to a question they were afraid to ask, an introduction when you hear of an opportunity that suits them.
It isn’t only generosity, either. A profession is only as strong as the people coming into it.
Every paraplanner who learns good habits early writes better reports, gives advisers more confidence, and passes the same standards on. Mentoring is a quiet way of improving the whole field.
You don’t need a title, or decades of experience, to begin. If you know something someone else is still working out, you can help. Offer an hour a month, ask what they’re stuck on, and resist fixing it for them.
Share the mistakes you made, because they’re the most useful part. And when someone asks for your time, say yes whenever you can.
So today I’ll be in a room full of people who care about doing this work well, cheering for someone I’m proud of. If she wins, wonderful. If she doesn’t, I’ll be just as glad I was invited.
Whoever helped you, there’s a good chance they never heard how it turned out. Tell them. Then find someone else to be in the room for.
EDIT: Katie did win!
Main image: talk, mentor, man, woman, vitaly-gariev-M2lMs1qK54g-unsplash
