Robert Rosenfeld has been teaching managers how to lead since 1981, which means he has also spent four decades watching them ignore the advice and figure it out anyway.

Born in Montreal and now based in London, Robert has worked with managers and leaders across more than 33 countries and 80 organisations — from FTSE 100 companies and international banks to government agencies and NGOs. His teaching has taken him from Bayes Business School and Headspring (a joint venture of the Financial Times and IE Business School) to Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, Tongji University in Shanghai, and ParisTech in Paris. That breadth of cross-cultural experience is not decorative: it shapes everything in this book.

His PhD from Warwick Business School examined how culture shapes employee attitudes across national boundaries — research that proved directly relevant to why the same mentoring approach works brilliantly with one person and falls flat with another.

In 1998, he founded the Centre for Organizational Excellence (Corex), a leadership development consultancy that worked with senior executives across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia for twenty-five years. From Manager to Mentor draws on that accumulated experience — the conversations that worked, the ones that didn't, and everything learned in between.

The book exists because, in all those years of working with managers, the same gap kept appearing: organisations invest heavily in identifying mentors, and almost nothing in helping them get better at it. That felt like a problem worth solving.

A companion volume for mentees is planned for 2026.