What CEOs need most, and rarely have
Discover why CEOs need trusted thinking partners. Learn from Sara Paker, Global Mentors Group’s Managing Director, how CEO mentoring provides confidential support, perspective, and leadership growth.
Written by: Sara Parker, Managing Director at Global Mentors Group
I didn’t expect to spend my career in mentoring. But the more time I spent working with business leaders and hearing what they were really grappling with, the more obvious something became. There was a gap – not in talent and ambition, but in space. A safe space to think, to be honest, and where the door stays closed.
It’s not something leaders talk about much.
The gap mentoring fills
The founders of what became Global Mentors Group spotted it years ago. Looking at brilliant people moving into the biggest roles of their lives and watching the door close behind them. Off you go. You must be perfect and ready, otherwise we wouldn’t have given you this job.
They knew this is madness. Because life at the top doesn’t work like that.
Leaders are surrounded by advice. Boards, investors, advisors input comes from everywhere, but most of it comes with an agenda. What many leaders don’t have is something much simpler: a thinking partner. Someone who has walked the same path, understood the pressure, and has no other agenda other than your success.
That’s the gap mentoring fills. Not strategy consulting, not coaching, but the sharing of human experience.
That’s why half the mentors in our community are active Chairs, former CEOs. They bring lived experience, not frameworks.
The world is changing, the need hasn’t.
The complexity and pace of what leaders face today with AI disruption, geopolitical instability and demanding boards is unlike anything that has come before. And yet the central need feels remarkably unchanged.
Even at the top, people need someone to think alongside.
Our mentors don’t tell CEOs what to do. They share experience and views based on the fact they have lived it too. And sometimes they simply hold the uncertainty with someone who can’t afford to show it anywhere else.
The sign that a relationship is really working? When a mentee texts on a Sunday evening saying: “I’ve got something big this week. Can I get 20 minutes?”
That’s not a formal meeting, or a process. That’s trust.
Leaders deserve better
In April 2026, we launched as Global Mentors Group – bringing together four world-class mentoring organisations into one integrated platform, serving leaders across the full pipeline. From Chairs and Board members, to sitting CEOs, through to rising executives.
That matters because the best companies aren’t just thinking about who the next CEO is. They’re thinking much further ahead and thinking about the people coming up behind them.
We’ve been building this for more than two decades and have helped more than 1500 leaders globally. While most studies list out clear benefits for mentoring, there still isn’t much data on it, partly because this market has barely existed as a structured or formal category. Leaders relied on who they happened to know.
We think the best leaders deserve better than luck. That’s what we are here for.
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