Mentoring That Matters

Mentoring That Makes an Impact

The mentoring concept is straightforward: someone with more knowledge and experience helps someone less experienced excel and succeed. Organizations that foster this should expect to strengthen their culture, improve retention, and increase performance, but only if mentoring is part of a thoughtful and comprehensive approach.

Mentoring does not work with a quick-fix mentality, and expectations must be managed.

For instance, it may help people come up to speed quickly and improve retention, but only when narrowly scoped, well-supported, actively managed, and sustained over time.

Similarly, there is little evidence that mentoring serves as a primary driver of company culture; however, it can build trust, foster psychological safety, and improve knowledge sharing, which leads to more collaborative behaviors, and behavior is what defines culture.

Mentoring isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Implementations span a spectrum from informal and ad hoc to formal and structured, and the required investment and expected outcomes vary accordingly.

It is okay to start small with mentoring, but as it grows, so will the work required to support it. Approaches that succeed informally in small settings often fail when they are scaled up without a corresponding increase in attention, structure, and ownership.

Managers should consider the options available to them to make deliberate decisions about implementing and supporting mentoring to achieve positive results. Here are three approaches to consider:

• Nurture informal mentoring: The manager shapes behaviors that promote ad hoc mentoring rather than launching initiatives.
• Facilitate mentoring: Mentoring becomes a tool for the manager to use selectively.
• Formal mentoring: A system that must be fully resourced to be effective.

Let’s explore these approaches in more detail.

Nurture It

Informal mentoring happens in most organizations. Employees help each other, ask questions, and share what they know. It is part of the way they work, not a separate program.

The manager’s role is to nurture these behaviors, not name or codify them. Otherwise, if the activities get labeled, everybody’s expectations change. Employees will want guidelines, management will demand metrics, and what was voluntary and positive now becomes evaluated and forced.

Instead, managers should nurture mentoring by noticing and reinforcing behaviors that promote collaboration and development. When someone solves a problem well, ask them to walk a teammate through their approach. When someone has expertise, create space for others to ask questions. Encourage the team to use each other to solve problems.

Nurturing mentoring is active management and requires a reasonable level of functional, trusting relationships. The manager must pay attention, protect time for learning, and reinforce the behaviors they want to see, even when there’s no program to point to.

This approach allows the manager to shape an environment in which people help each other grow, without asking mentoring to carry more weight than it can support.

Facilitate It

Sometimes informal mentoring isn’t enough. The team has a skills gap, or a new employee needs to come up to speed quickly. Managers can use mentoring to address these needs directly, without initiating a formal program.

The manager isn’t the mentor, but they identify a need, introduce the relationship, and create a structure for success. The purpose should be clear, have a limited scope, and be grounded in real-world challenges.

This might look like a project manager mentoring a junior colleague on design skills, a new employee paired with a mentor for their first few months, or a senior leader mentoring a new manager through their first year of strategic responsibility.

When I ran system implementation projects, I used facilitated mentoring to support user adoption. We would select a user who was well respected and invested in the system’s success. We would train them, and then they would train the rest of the staff and serve as onsite support. This train-the-trainer approach was facilitated mentoring, and it worked well for everyone.

People vary in their ability to mentor and to be mentored, so outcomes will differ based on skill, commitment, and fit. The variability in results is not a flaw in the approach but a reflection of a people-based system. It does mean, though, that facilitated mentoring cannot be generalized or imposed. Otherwise, people will become resentful.

This is not a tool to compensate for weak management or to fix performance problems. It should be used selectively and actively managed so managers can address development needs without creating expectations that the organization cannot sustain.

Formalize It

When development needs to be scaled consistently across teams, informal and manager-facilitated mentoring may not be enough. If the company’s leadership pipelines need strengthening at scale or if mentoring is tied to broader goals such as succession planning or diversity, a formal program can produce meaningful results.

This option represents a fundamentally different level of ambition and risk, and the organization must treat it as a system rather than an initiative. Starting a mentoring program creates expectations about fairness, quality, outcomes, and follow-through. The program must be narrowly scoped to an achievable goal, with success criteria defined upfront.

The organization must be willing to invest time, training, and attention over an extended period. A human resources department cannot meet these expectations alone. It requires managers to make time, reinforce participation, and connect mentoring to real work and development conversations. If HR or senior leadership wants the program more than managers do, it will fail.

If done poorly, this approach has the greatest downside risk. Many organizations fall into the trap of believing a formal program can’t hurt. In reality, under-resourced mentoring programs can leave the organization worse off than before. Managers disengage, participants feel abandoned, mentoring becomes perfunctory, and cynicism grows.

Since managers are central to the success of a proposed program, they must understand its implications and the choices involved. If an organization isn’t committed to making the required investment, then managers should focus on nurturing the environment and facilitating targeted mentoring opportunities. These aren’t compromises; they are better choices.

Formal mentoring can work—but only when ambition is matched with ownership, resources, and sustained commitment.

Making Mentoring Work

Mentoring isn’t all or nothing. When managers understand the options for mentoring and their role in the process, they become more confident in choosing the right approach.

Managers can feel confident that they can nurture informal mentoring without feeling pressured to name it or turn it into a program. When someone needs targeted development, managers can facilitate mentoring relationships that meet a specific need. If the organization proposes a formal program, managers will understand what it takes to make it work, acknowledge the consequences if it doesn’t, and commit to supporting it.

Alaskans know that learning from each other isn’t optional. In extreme conditions, local knowledge keeps people safe and helps them succeed. Organizations face the same reality, and workforce challenges aren’t getting easier. When knowledge and experience are effectively transferred, the organization becomes stronger.

Mentoring matters because Alaska needs leaders who know how to develop people without wasting time on initiatives that won’t work. Get it right, and we build the workforce Alaska needs.