The power of peer mentoring

By Charlotte Bonner-Evans, InFrame Project Manager, University of Glasgow.

This blog post is part of an ongoing series exploring themes and practices relevant to our aspiring, developing and established Research Leaders.

It can be lonely when you are always looking at what’s ahead, and not at what’s beside you.Leadership roles by their nature can feel lonely. Making decisions, offering strategic opinions, and navigating leadership in your school, the university, and for yourself and others. Often responsibilities of leadership require independent decision making where leaders must act alone (Heifetz, 2009). However, this doesn’t mean you have to be a lone leader. Succeeding with complex leadership challenges requires implicit knowledge about our working environment to be exchanged, and where traditional development routes for leadership can be scarce (Lawton Smith, 2020) – here’s where a peer-to-peer mentoring model can help.

A typical but outdated assumption of mentoring is that it is an activity put in place to rectify a deficit in the mentee, leading to peer mentoring often being overlooked for leadership development (Brower, 2026). But who better than your peers to be able to relate to your experiences, understand systemic challenges and help you to process and solve problems?

Here I set out my case for building leadership through peer mentoring and the power it holds for positive change through not only what you can learn from one another, but by the impact it can have on social connectedness, development, collegiality, and research culture.

Making mentoring reciprocal and not based on privilege

Mentor is a title no longer reserved for ‘teacher’ ‘elder’ or ‘senior’. In fact, when a substantial power imbalance exists within a mentoring relationship, then the opportunity for sharing and learning is greatly reduced. (Basiliere et al., 2019). The parity of power provided by peer mentoring generates trust and confidence enabling the sharing of comparable challenges and learning without fear of reprisal or judgement.

“A mentor is not someone who walks ahead of us to show us how they did it. A mentor walks alongside us to show us what we can do.” Simon Sinek on LinkedIn, drawing on an idea from his bestseller ‘Start With Why’ (Sinek, 2009)

Making a shift from the dominance of hierarchy, peer mentoring is based on evidence that mentoring can be reciprocal, allowing space for multiple ideas and views to be shared and both parties to reflect on problems and experiences.

Developmental opportunities that benefit you and your researchers

You can take advantage of your peers’ knowledge and expertise and make yours accessible to them. You may be able to share with your peer specialist knowledge on research finance, whereas they could have lived experience of HR processes you are now navigating. The sharing of such knowledge and skills benefits you, your peers, and the wider research community, through skills and knowledge exchange, improving navigation of administrative duties (Friedman et al, 2021), and importantly, tacit knowledge retention for the local research cluster or community, including exposure to a breadth of disciplines, theories, and methods; project management methods; and insights into supervisor relationships (Booth et al, 2016)

Peer mentoring for leadership also offers social benefits including the opportunity for network building and social interconnection (Fleming et al, 2015), debriefing and offloading, reflection, self-evaluation, and sensemaking (Murrell, 2021) and a greater sense of collective safety (Laird et al, 2024).

Additionally, hearing different perspectives and frames of reference to our own can offer powerful experience for peer mentoring partnerships (Womack, 2020). Our own world view is the sum total all of our reality, and working with peers across disciplines and paradigms can broaden our world view and supplement our understanding as we navigate leadership in increasingly diverse workplaces. If we continually seek out those who have very similar experiences and views, we will not grow, as we only know one small way of thinking. Acknowledgement that our experiences and world views differ dependent on our reality is an important element in mentoring as it builds trust. Good (peer) mentors have the self-awareness that each (peer) mentee has their own context and reality.

Peer Mentoring cultivates a connected and appreciative culture

Notice the traditional academic hierarchy, usually a triangle where there are naturally fewer people in leadership roles than there are in team roles. Those in leadership roles can have limited access to community or team camaraderie. Peer mentoring offers a feeling of belonging (Martin, Mori, and Froehlich, 2023), whereby sharing experiences and challenges with a peer, helps colleagues to realise they understand and have experienced something similar.

Returning to the idea of the ‘lone leader’, you can be working with, and supporting others, all day, but feel incredibly lonely in the workplace – sound familiar? Loneliness can lead to depersonalisation, distancing from colleagues and isolation – all elements that contribute to burnout (Murray and Christison, 2023). In a culture that tells leaders it is unprofessional to become friends with their subordinates, having peer support helps to develop meaningful interactions and a sense of relatedness (Baik et al., 2017). Evidence demonstrates that when taking part in peer mentoring participants experience an enhanced, inclusive, and appreciative culture (Pioli and Evans, 2015).

Take the plunge

Resist the narrative of the lone leader and ask yourself, ‘Am I collegial?’ (Guccione, 2026). Peer mentoring promotes collaborative working, empathy, and empowerment.  Below are some of the parameters you can use to assess and define what you and your colleague want to gain from a peer mentoring partnership. Go on, test the power of peer mentoring!

In peer mentoring you can, for example:

• Agree to maintain confidentiality
• Agree to be a place for sounding out ideas and processing complex thoughts
• Clarify your career goals, values, strengths and priorities
• Work towards refining a project idea
• Support each other with line management, team leadership or supervision questions
• Discuss ‘what’ is on your plate’ and help each other prioritise
• Help find creative ways to overcome problems or a sense of feeling ‘stuck’.
• Listen, and be listened to
• Ask for and give feedback
• Use questioning techniques to support critical thinking (Guccione, 2022)
• Utilise a formalised process of peer mentoring to experiment with new ways of working
• Enhance your enthusiasm for collaboration with your peers, colleagues, and wider networks.
• Find out what you have in common, what ideas and interests you share
• Benefit from your differences. Embrace different perspectives, standpoints and frames of reference – acknowledge and learn
• Demonstrate collegiality in practice (Lim and Backwell, 2026)
• Take accountability for the actions you plan to take as a result of the conversation, and support a peer to be accountable for their actions