26 Dec Intentional Leadership: How Mentoring Builds Stronger People, Teams, and Organizations
Toya Werkheiser, Global Marketing Operations Director at Cigna shares her journey from mentee to mentor. Toya’s career has spanned revenue cycle management, compliance, strategy and planning, and marketing operations, giving her a broad perspective on what ultimately drives performance.
Leadership development is often discussed in terms of competencies, strategies, and business outcomes. Yet some of the most meaningful growth begins somewhere more personal: with intentionality, vulnerability, and a willingness to learn from another person.
Throughout the conversation, one theme continued to surface: strong leadership begins with investing intentionally in people.
Mentoring Works Best When You Bring Intention to the Experience
Toya credits much of the impact of her Menttium experience to the intentionality behind both the mentor match and the mentoring partnership itself.
Her mentor, Artie, did not approach their conversations by prescribing solutions. Instead, he asked thoughtful questions, shared relevant stories, and helped Toya arrive at conclusions that were right for her. Their conversations could feel light and comfortable while still exploring meaningful and sometimes difficult topics.
But the responsibility for a successful mentoring experience did not belong to the mentor alone.
Toya came to meetings prepared. Topics were often shared in advance. She was willing to acknowledge areas where she did not have an answer and openly discuss challenges.
That combination created the conditions for growth.
There is an important lesson for anyone entering a mentoring relationship: access to a mentor creates an opportunity, but intentional participation determines how much value you can gain from it.
Preparing for conversations, identifying the questions that matter, reflecting between meetings, and being open about where you need support allow a mentoring partnership to move beyond conversation and toward meaningful development.
Great Leaders Build People Before They Build Results
One of Toya’s most compelling leadership philosophies is also remarkably simple.
Throughout her career, she has thought less about building functions and more about building people.
Leaders are responsible for delivering business outcomes, but those outcomes are ultimately accomplished through teams. Toya encourages leaders to consider what each person needs to perform at their best, where strengths already exist, and where an investment in development could unlock greater contribution.
This requires leaders to ask different questions:
Where does this person add the most value?
What strengths could we develop further?
Where does the team need support?
Does each person understand how their contribution connects to something meaningful?
When people understand their purpose and feel empowered to use their strengths, performance can follow.
For organizations focused on engagement, retention, succession planning, and leadership readiness, this is an important reminder. Leadership development has its greatest impact when people can translate learning directly into how they lead and support others.
Empathy Is a Leadership Capability
Toya also speaks about empathy as an essential component of effective leadership.
Modern workplaces have made the realities of employees’ lives increasingly visible. Teams may be distributed across locations and time zones. People may be simultaneously navigating family responsibilities, organizational change, uncertainty, loss, and demanding business priorities.
Leaders cannot separate those realities entirely from the people showing up to work.
Toya describes the relationship between empathy and engagement clearly: people need to feel that their leaders are invested in them if leaders expect employees to invest themselves in their work and organization.
Empathy does not reduce expectations or accountability. It gives leaders greater insight into what their people need to succeed.
That understanding can influence how leaders communicate, coach, delegate, provide feedback, and respond when circumstances change.
It can also strengthen trust, which becomes especially important when teams are navigating ambiguity or disruption.
Vulnerability Can Deepen a Mentoring Relationship
Toya experienced this lesson from another perspective when she returned to Menttium as a mentor.
Her first mentoring partnership began in 2019 and continued into 2020, an extraordinarily difficult period personally and collectively. While navigating the pandemic and social unrest, Toya also experienced significant loss within her own family.
Like many professionals, she initially tried to continue working while carrying those experiences privately.
Eventually, she made a different choice within her mentoring partnership.
She chose transparency.
Rather than continuing through a mentoring conversation as though nothing had happened, Toya acknowledged what she was experiencing. That moment changed the conversation. Mentor and mentee returned, in Toya’s words, to being “humans first.”
The experience illustrates an important dimension of mentoring that can be difficult to quantify.
Mentoring creates space for people to be known beyond their job title.
A confidential relationship with someone outside your immediate reporting structure can provide room to acknowledge uncertainty, examine difficult experiences, ask questions you may hesitate to ask elsewhere, and gain perspective from someone whose experiences differ from your own.
Those conversations can build understanding that extends far beyond the mentoring meeting.
Different Perspectives Create Opportunities for Growth
Cross-company mentoring intentionally brings together people whose backgrounds, experiences, organizations, industries, and perspectives may be very different.
That difference is part of the value.
Toya reflected on how deeply personal conversations between two people can create opportunities to see one another differently and challenge preconceived beliefs. In her mentoring partnership, those conversations contributed to professional development while also building human connection and understanding.
This is one of the unique strengths of mentoring.
A mentor can provide perspective that may not exist inside the mentee’s immediate team or organization. A mentee can expose a mentor to experiences and viewpoints that broaden the mentor’s own leadership perspective.
The learning becomes bi-directional.
Over time, those individual relationships can influence how people lead teams, approach differences, make decisions, and create environments where others can contribute fully.
From Mentee to Mentor
Perhaps one of the strongest indicators of Toya’s mentoring experience is that the lessons did not end when her formal program concluded.
She carried them forward.
As a mentor herself, she now draws on the practices she experienced with Artie, including asking guiding questions, creating space for reflection, approaching conversations intentionally, and allowing vulnerability into the relationship.
That is how the impact of mentoring multiplies.
One person develops through a mentoring relationship. That person applies what they learned as a leader. Eventually, they may mentor someone else, passing along perspective, encouragement, questions, and wisdom developed throughout their own career.
A single mentoring partnership can influence far more than two people.
It can strengthen teams, shape leaders, expand perspectives, and create a culture where developing others becomes part of how leadership is practiced.
Creating More Through Mentoring
Toya’s journey from mentee to mentor demonstrates what becomes possible when people approach development with intention.
Prepare for the conversation.
Ask the difficult question.
Be open about what you do not know.
Invest in people’s strengths.
Lead with empathy.
Allow yourself to learn from someone whose experiences may be very different from your own.
And when the opportunity comes, share what you have learned with the next person.
Because some of the most meaningful leadership development happens through a relationship with someone willing to listen, ask the right questions, and help us see possibilities we may not have seen on our own.