Finding the mentorship moments your team is missing

In the evolving landscape of the modern workplace, you might be missing out on powerful mentorship moments. Virtual meetings, hybrid schedules, and remote workers have limited opportunities for authentic interaction.

Joining us on this episode of Business Trends Today is speaker, entrepreneur, and author Amy Summers. Her book, Lift: 10 Mentorship Touchpoints to Empower Your Team and Accelerate Your Career, is helping leaders find those mentorship moments. 

The importance of informal moments

Remote and hybrid work stripped away the informal moments that once built workplace culture. Water-cooler conversations, post-meeting debriefs, and lunchtime brainstorming sessions have all but disappeared.

Summers says that gap is now showing up in employee behavior. Workers who don’t hear from leadership don’t stay neutral, instead they often assume the worst.

“When leaders or companies are silent, people make up their own stories,” Summers says.

For small businesses, that dynamic can be even more important. Disengagement spreads fast in small teams, Summers says, and so does turnover.

Be present, not just available

It’s simply not enough to set aside time for mentorship, Summers says.

"It's not about more of our time. It's just when we do have time with them, truly be present."

She says she often sees leaders announce open hours or invite team members to call, but the calls never come. Summers says younger employees, shaped by pandemic-era standards, are less likely to engage. But the burden, she says, falls on the employer.

“If you have a remote team and you’re doing your meetings on Zoom, so the meeting’s over, everybody leaves Zoom, everyone’s gone, disappears,” Summers says.

Her solution is to create the follow-up conversation that used to happen naturally.

Summers went hybrid with her own business in 2010, years before most leaders were forced to adapt. Even with that head start, she says, it took her nearly a decade to figure out what was missing and how to recreate it. The key, she says, is to notice when those natural moments would have occurred and create them instead.

Follow the leader

Employee behavior mirrors leadership behavior, Summers says. In a small business, that mirror is closer and clearer than anywhere else.

Leaders who are disengaged produce disengaged teams. Leaders who show up produce employees who do the same. The next generation of workplace leaders is watching and learning from whoever is above them right now.

She frames the touchpoints in her book not as obligations but as habits. Small, repeatable actions that compound over time. It could be short, spontaneous phone calls or quick follow-up Zoom chats after meetings. It’s not about micro-managing, but creating a culture of genuine attention that team members come to expect and appreciate.

“It’s really just a touch point, it’s just how can I make a human connection and get away from these screens so that we’re developing a relationship,” Summers says.