"I genuinely believe this is one of the big unseen components of anyone’s success.”
Last week, The Pipeline ran its third alumnae webinar of our 2026 series of events, on 'The Power of Mentorship'.
Chaired by Rhonda Martin, Pipeline Client Engagement Director, Dr Gemma Harper OBE FAcSS, CEO of JNCC, and Vimbainashe Chinhoyi, Head of Business Operations at Defra, shared their experiences and insights from their personal experiences and mentoring relationship. One theme came through again and again: the best mentoring relationships do not just help you progress professionally. They help you understand yourself differently.
For Vimbai, mentorship was about “people seeing something in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself.” She reflected powerfully on the challenge of trying to become something you cannot yet see around you, particularly as a Black woman navigating senior leadership spaces. Mentors helped her challenge limiting beliefs, build confidence, and create a clearer sense of who she wanted to become.
Gemma spoke about mentorship in similarly reflective terms: “being seen through someone else’s eyes”, and having trusted people around you who help you reframe risk, recognise your strengths, and develop deeper self-belief.
What was especially striking was how both speakers described mentorship not as a transactional exercise, but as a relationship built on trust, openness, reciprocity and genuine connection. As Gemma put it, mentoring works best when it becomes “co-coaching” rather than simply advice-giving and the sharing of external perspectives. This reinforces the different roles that mentors play, this impacting the different approaches needed due to different contexts.
That really resonated with us at The Pipeline.
One of the greatest strengths of the Pipeline programmes is the space they create for participants to learn not only from speakers and facilitators, but from one another. Again and again, participants tell us how powerful it is to be surrounded by peers who reflect back strengths, ambitions and possibilities they had not fully recognised in themselves before.
Those relationships often become one of the most lasting and transformative parts of the experience.
