By Sarah Nicastro, Founder and Editor in Chief, Future of Field Service
We talk a lot about the future of the service workforce. And we’re going to do so again here, because it’s one of the biggest challenges the leaders I speak with face.
While the questions are infinite, we tend to focus on a few specific (and somewhat short-sighted) ones: How do we attract younger generations to careers in service? How do we compete for talent when the skills we need are increasingly scarce?
In last week’s article, I reflected on the reality that, while these questions are certainly important, we need to dive deeper if we want sustainable outcomes. As such, we need to explore questions like how do we retain experienced technicians long enough to transfer their knowledge? How do we create an employee experience compelling enough that people choose to build a career in service rather than simply passing through it?
There are many pieces that will play a role in solving the puzzle, including strong leadership, technology, career pathing, flexible work, better compensation, skills development and more.
But in last week’s UNSCRIPTED conversation with Samantha Campbell, Senior Director of Field Services at Brightstar Lottery and a 2025 Stand Out 50 leader, offered an additional puzzle piece that is both remarkably simple and, perhaps, more strategically significant than we give it credit for: “I don’t think we’re going to recruit our way out of this talent gap. We really have to mentor our way out of it.”
That statement stuck with me.
Because it acknowledges an important truth about the workforce challenge facing field service: we don't just have a talent acquisition problem. We have a talent development, knowledge transfer, belonging, and retention problem.
And mentoring has the potential to address all of those things at once.
Mentoring is More Than Developing Individual Talent
Samantha shared her experiences in mentoring from both sides of the relationship.
Throughout her career, she has had three mentors and a sponsor who profoundly influenced her development. What struck me was how she described those relationships—not simply as sources of advice, but as connections that ultimately gave her greater confidence, empathy, and perspective.
Like many find, those relationships didn't necessarily end when the formal mentoring arrangement did.
Her mentors became people she could continue to call for guidance. Some became friends. In other words, the value wasn't confined to a six-month program or a particular set of objectives.
We can approach mentoring as another box to check in a talent development strategy: Match people together. Establish some goals. Schedule meetings. Complete the program.
But the real power of mentoring is much more human than that.
It's having someone who knows your potential, challenges your thinking, helps you see possibilities you may not see yourself and gives you the confidence to take the next step.
And for field service, where experience and institutional knowledge are so valuable, that relationship can have an impact far beyond the individual.
Mentoring as a Tool for Knowledge Transfer
One of Samantha's most compelling observations was the opportunity for mentoring to serve as a mechanism for both knowledge transfer and confidence building.
One of the most significant challenges with the aging field service workforce is that many experienced employees have decades of knowledge that can't simply be captured in a manual or transferred through an online training course.
They know how to troubleshoot the unusual problem. They know what questions to ask a customer. They understand the nuances of a particular environment. They've developed judgment through years of experience.
The Best Mentoring Isn't Necessarily Top-Down
And that brings me to another lesson from Samantha and I’s discussion.
She shared a really fascinating and I think unique experience, in which she and a colleague were asked to mentor their CEO.
The objective was initially to help the CEO better understand the changing expectations of Millennials and Gen Z in the workplace. But the relationship evolved into something much more meaningful.
They researched what other companies were doing with emerging talent, explored how Brightstar could better leverage that talent and ultimately helped create an employee impact group called Next Gen, which continues today.
The experience reinforced something Samantha considers fundamental to effective mentoring: The best leaders remain curious.
Mentoring isn't simply about an experienced person imparting wisdom to someone with less experience. It can—and perhaps should more often than it does—work in both directions.
That is particularly relevant in field service today. The people closest to the work may have perspectives that leaders desperately need to hear. They may understand changing employee expectations, customer behaviors, or technology adoption in ways that aren't readily visible from the executive level.
A frontline employee doesn't need to have 20 years of experience to have something valuable to teach a leader. When mentoring is viewed in this mutually beneficial lens, there’s even more to gain.
If You Want Mentoring to Work, Prioritize and Protect It
When Samantha was mentoring the CEO, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and she assumed the program would be one of the first things to disappear as the business dealt with unprecedented operational pressure.
Instead, the CEO told them the mentoring session was the most important meeting on his calendar; that it would be protected regardless of what else was happening.
Think about the message that sends.
We talk constantly about employee engagement and whether people feel valued. We ask whether employees feel that their voices matter.
There may be few stronger ways to communicate that than to consistently show up.
If mentoring is always the meeting that gets moved when something “more important” comes along, we're telling people exactly where they sit on the priority list.
Samantha's experience was that protecting that time created loyalty and a deep sense of commitment, and she’s protected that time in the same was in all of her mentoring relationships since.
So there’s an opportunity with mentoring beyond launching a program. By protecting it, treating it as crucial, you send a message about how much you value your employees and their perspectives.
Structure Creates Accountability, Humanity Creates Impact
Samantha has been fortunate to work within a fairly structured mentoring program at Brightstar, and she identified several elements that have made it successful:
- Establishing a defined timeframe. For external mentoring relationships, she has found six to nine months to be an effective window. A defined endpoint gives both people the opportunity to establish goals and smaller milestones rather than allowing the relationship to become vague or perpetually deferred.
- Brightstar also builds in progress notes, feedback and check-ins that are driven by the mentee.
- Confidentiality is established from the beginning. That creates the psychological safety required for people to be honest.
But structure alone isn't enough to make mentoring successful.
Samantha's advice to mentors is remarkably simple: turn off the distractions, listen, and be vulnerable. Her phone isn't in the room during mentoring sessions. She makes a deliberate effort not to jump immediately to an answer. Instead, she tries to help the mentee work through their own logic and arrive at their own conclusions.
That distinction matters. The objective of mentoring isn't to create another version of the mentor. It's to help someone become a stronger version of themselves. And sometimes that means resisting the temptation to solve the problem for them.
Samantha highlighting vulnerability is important, because it’s something I think we underestimate in leadership generally.
She tries to demonstrate it early in mentoring relationships because it gives the other person permission to be honest and open as well.
That makes sense. It's difficult to ask someone to share what they're struggling with, where they lack confidence, or what they don't understand if you’re presenting yourself as someone who has everything figured out.
Mentoring works better when it feels like a human relationship rather than a performance review. And in field service, where many employees are accustomed to being measured primarily by operational outcomes, creating space for that kind of conversation can be especially meaningful.
Mentoring as a Broader Workforce Development Strategy
Perhaps the biggest opportunity for organizations isn't simply what happens between mentor and mentee. It's what happens because of those conversations.
At Brightstar, Samantha shared examples of mentoring relationships contributing to changes in communication across the field, culture, talent development, and career mapping.
Emerging talent gains visibility. Ideas move upward. Leaders gain perspective. Employees see that their experiences can influence the organization.
Brightstar has a process for anonymizing themes emerging from mentoring relationships and sharing those themes among mentors and leaders. That means the organization can learn from what employees are saying without compromising the confidentiality of individual mentoring relationships.
But if multiple mentoring relationships begin surfacing similar themes around communication, career progression, tools, culture or workload, the organization should be listening. Mentoring is an incredibly valuable listening mechanism.
And when employees see that something they raised ultimately contributes to positive change—even if their name is never attached to it—that creates another layer of value.
The company is listening to us.
That is where mentoring begins to move from an individual development initiative to a broader workforce strategy.
It’s been said by countless leaders on this platform: there is no future of service without people. We simply must undertake the hard work of determining not just how to attract new talent, but how to build fulfilled employees with long careers.
I loved Samantha’s take on the role mentoring can play in this process. “Mentoring is one of the most human ways we can build a stronger business,” she said.
As we race to keep pace with technology and changing customer expectations, there is a risk that some of the practices that seem less “innovative”—mentoring, coaching, listening, relationship building—get pushed down the priority list.
But perhaps those are precisely the practices we need to protect.