Amy Summers’ 10 Touchpoints for Effective Team Mentorship

Amy Summers, entrepreneur and author of Lift: 10 Mentorship Touchpoints to Empower Your Team and Accelerate Your Career, joins The Female Founder to discuss how leaders can integrate mentorship into everyday interactions without adding to their workload. As companies grow, founders—particularly women leaders—often become the default mentors for their teams. Summers explains how shifting mentorship from a formal program to a natural, consistent leadership practice can strengthen culture, improve performance, and prevent burnout.

Summers outlines how intentional mentorship can be embedded into daily moments, especially in hybrid and remote environments where connection may be limited. She shares practical strategies for distributing mentorship across teams, fostering peer-to-peer support, and using curiosity-driven conversations to better understand employee needs. By focusing on small, deliberate actions, leaders can build stronger relationships, increase engagement, and create sustainable growth—without overextending themselves.

Join us as we discuss:

• Redefining mentorship as a daily leadership habit
• The 10 mentorship touchpoints framework from Lift
• Avoiding burnout while supporting team development
• Strengthening culture in hybrid and remote environments
• Encouraging peer-to-peer mentorship across teams
• Using curiosity and small actions to build engagement
• Driving retention, accountability, and performance through mentorship

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Mentorship Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:07

This is the Female Founder Show with host and entrepreneur Bridget Fitzpatrick exclusively on ASBN.

Informal Mentorship As A Leadership Style

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Hello everyone and welcome to the Female Founder Show. Today's conversation is one that I think many founders, especially women founders, are going to really relate to. As we build our companies, we naturally step into the role of supporter, encourager, mentor. We answer questions, we give advice, we help people grow. And most of the time, we're doing it without even realizing it. But as our teams get bigger, the responsibility gets heavier. Amy Summers is an entrepreneur, speaker, and the author of Lyft, 10 mentorship touch points to empower your team and accelerate your career. She believes mentorship isn't something that you add to your calendar. It's already happening in the everyday moments of leadership. The key is becoming intentional about it so that we can empower our teams without exhausting ourselves. Amy, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So I love this idea that mentorship is already happening every single day inside our companies. When you say informal mentorship, what does that mean in real life?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

I think it's just making a mentorship part of your leadership style. So that word mentorship gets thrown around a lot today, and I think that we've kind of made it into a thing. And I keep saying it's not really a thing. It should be something that everyone is just doing, but I think we've made it a thing and we've put it into formal programs and we've made it even a title, you know, calling someone your mentor. And I think we've had to do that because we are in an environment now at work where we're really devoid of human touch and human relationships. So a lot of that has to do with our hybrid and remote environments. And so I always say it's just like for married couples, they have to have date night on Friday night. And I always say, why don't we have date night on every night? I think in our businesses, we've created mentorship programs to remind people to be in relationship with their team. But it's not that complicated. And in my book, Lyft, I really try to simplify it so that you just make it a natural part of your leadership style.

Rebuilding Human Connection At Work

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Now, for so many founders that don't have time to launch the formal programs that you just talked about, why do these small everyday interactions matter more than something structured and official?

SPEAKER_02 2:36

It matters the most now because we have really allowed technology to come into our workplace and into our homes and really separate us from human touch. So sometimes my mom will even text me, hey, can we talk? I mean, instead of just calling me. You remember impromptu phone calls, people would just call out of the blue. We don't do that spontaneous communication anymore. And so everything is so structured. Uh, what we need to really aim to do is bring back that human touch and just be human. Just pick up the phone, call somebody, just if you're in an office, walk into someone's office unannounced and just say, hey, I really appreciate what you're doing. Those are the types of things that we need to be more intentional about now.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yeah, I hope we start to see more of that. You know, I feel like we're starting to see more people in the office now and kind of getting back to pre-COVID mentalities, but I do hope that we get back to the more of that. So, because I miss it for sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Yeah, and if we don't, I mean, if if you are in that type of an environment, then we just have to be super intentional about it. Because if we are being separated by screens, then we have to remind ourselves that we have to break that down. Um, because our technology is great, it makes us very productive, very efficient, but it also, you know, it protects us from talking to people. It's I even my phone asked me the other day, would you like me to start screening all your calls? I'm like, oh, I don't think so. Because I mean, what if somebody important calls me or somebody that I really want to talk to? And how is it screening my calls? So we just have to remember we have to take charge of our obviously our boundaries and our schedule, but we we can't automate everything. You can't automate human human connection. Exactly.

The Touch Points And Showing Up

SPEAKER_01 4:20

In those small moments of mentorship that you talk about, um, we probably don't often recognize when they're happening. Does something get lost there? Talk to us about that.

Hard Feedback With Curiosity First

SPEAKER_02 4:31

Yeah, so in my book Left, I outline 10 touch points, is what I call them. And they're just simple things, and probably most people read my book and go, oh, I I've done that before. But what I've tried to do in the book is is name what they are and then just help, you know, people to leaders to make them more habitual, so be more intentional about them. You've probably done a lot of these things before. We're just not in the habit of doing them. So for example, uh touch point number one is just show up, you know, show up. And so we're not showing up in a lot of spaces these days, uh, for instance, in the interview process. You know, how often does the CEO or the manager just show up in an interview and see what talent they're hiring? It signals to whoever you're hiring that they are important. And it also lets the leader know who they're bringing in on their team. And you can't get that from just, you know, technology and paper and what somebody looks like on a resume. It's not maybe how they might be in person. So just showing up in some of those spaces, showing up in a meeting, um, showing up for somebody that that shows a lot of respect and it creates a connection and it makes your team want to work harder for you because they it's signaling to them that you cared enough to attend.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

100%. That's that's a very great point. Now, a lot of us feel responsible for everyone's emotions as leaders, um, not just their performance. So, how do we let go of some of that pressure and still be great leaders?

SPEAKER_02 6:04

Well, um, I I guess what you're talking about is uh are you talking about like the emotions somebody has like dipping into their job? Give me an example.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Yeah, so when we're talking to someone, it might be in a performance review or just a check-in, and we might have some something that might be critical or something about their performance that we might not want to talk about, and we feel like we might hurt their feelings, but um, but we still need to protect them and the company and everything. So, how do we how do we go about that?

SPEAKER_02 6:32

You know, a good way to start in that situation is just to begin with a little curiosity. So just get curious. Instead of starting with, hey, this is what I'm seeing, and this is what I need you to do better, ask them, hey, how are things going with you? I've noticed that maybe your production's a little down, but I I want to understand that. Is everything okay at home? Or is the where I have you working and the team I'm having you working with, is that working out for you? I mean, get a little curious, and I think you'll discover, you'll you'll get context for maybe how their performance is going versus going straight in and telling them what to fix. I think as leaders, that's what we do. We're like, here's how you fix it, and here's how you do things that, you know, we're just kind of like a bull in a china closet, you know, like come straight in. But if we just start with curiosity and just start asking questions that may open them up to letting us know what their situation is, that could help us as leaders place them in a situation where they can succeed. So maybe their remote work environment isn't ideal, maybe their Wi-Fi is terrible and they can't get the you know Wi-Fi that they need, then we can start problem solving from a different perspective because we have more understanding and more empathy for you know their condition.

Support Without Being Always Available

SPEAKER_01 7:51

That I love that. It makes so much sense. Be curious, ask the questions that need to be asked. I love that. Thank you for that advice. Very good. Now, how can we stay supportive to our team without feeling like we have to be constantly accessible or always available for them?

SPEAKER_02 8:08

I mean, support can come in many different ways, and I think it's important to model support because I mean you can't be the well for everybody, right? So this is where mentoring really, you know, shines. So you want to show that you're accessible, but you want to teach your team members to be accessible to their coworkers too. I mean, everybody can chip in here, and so this is where I say that being a mentor is it's not a title. Uh, you don't have to have years of experience to be in charge. Even your junior person can be a leader. Give them that authority. Tell them that they are in charge of the internship program and let them let them have free reign and see how that they do. Um, this way you're shifting the responsibility to everybody to be accessible and to help build up. And so then it becomes more of a team and collaborative effort versus just one person having the to have to have that weight on their shoulders of being the only person that everybody can go to.

Lyft Takeaways And Relationships That Last

SPEAKER_01 9:07

Yeah, I think that would probably be really good for culture as well to know that there are there's layers of mentorship that doesn't only come from the top. So I think that's that's a great point. Let's talk about Lyft. 10 mentorship touch points to empower your team and accelerate your career. What is what are some of the takeaways that you'd like your readers to take away from the book?

Closing Thanks And Guest Invitation

SPEAKER_02 9:29

I mean, the biggest takeaway is that mentorship is a relationship, just at its core, at its essence, that's what it is. It's all all that it is, and that as human beings, we are wired to be in relationship with people. And somewhere along the way, someone said you can't be in a relationship with people at work, and they started creating all these rules and making everyone feel very uncomfortable about it. But the truth is that you just can't get past that human nature that we do want to be in relationship. And for a lot of people, they spend the majority of their time at work and with the people they're working with. So investing your time and your energy into the people that you work with and treating them with, you know, dignity and kindness and respect and all of those things that hopefully you're also doing at home with the people that you live with, it goes a long way. And I would say that, you know, at the end of your career, um, and I mentioned this in the book, what really matters is going to be all these relationships you've had along the way in your career. It's not gonna be how much money you made, or you know, what title you had, or you know, how many events you went to, you were at the Grammys or the Oscars, all that stuff is not really gonna matter. What you're really gonna remember is the people you help build up, and that is a true treasure at the end of your career.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

It really is. What it's all about is the people, right? Yes. Yes. Amy Summers, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate all the time and great advice that you've given us, and really excited about the book. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Um host and entrepreneur, Bridget Fitzpatrick, exclusively on ASBN. If you're a female founder and would like to help other female founders with your inspiring story, we would love to hear from you.