Design a Better Mentoring Program in 4 Key Steps

What Is Mentoring at Work?
Mentoring at work is a purposeful relationship in which a more experienced or knowledgeable employee provides guidance, support, and insight to a less experienced colleague, helping them develop skills, navigate challenges, and advance their career. Forward-thinking learning and development leaders strive to design a better mentoring program because they view mentoring as a cornerstone of employee growth that can:

• Maximize learning
• Increase employee engagement
• Drive long-term performance impact

Common Workplace Mentoring Drivers
Given the complex career paths and evolving roles within organizations, many companies design a better mentoring program to be a strategic tool. Based on organizational culture assessment data, the most common drivers for implementing workplace mentoring include:

• Enhancing career growth opportunities for employees at all levels

• Boosting performance, engagement, and retention across the workforce

• Investing in high-potential talent while promoting diversity and inclusion

• Developing skills, sharing expertise, and leveraging strengths effectively

• Encouraging exploration of new interests and professional challenges

Does Mentoring Work?
While Forbes reports that 71% of Fortune 500 companies offer mentoring programs and research from Olivet Nazarene University shows that 75% of employees would like a mentor, only 37% currently have one at work. This gap is often attributed to ineffective program design and the limited availability of highly sought-after mentors.

The short answer to whether mentoring achieves its objectives is: sometimes. When executed well, mentoring can improve employee engagement, support talent development, enhance recruitment, and prepare the next generation of leaders. However, effective mentoring requires deliberate effort, commitment, and active participation from both mentors and mentees. Evidence demonstrating measurable impact at the organizational level is limited, underscoring the need for programs that are thoughtfully structured and carefully managed.

How to Design a Better Mentoring Program

If you want to design a better mentoring program at work, here are the four basics from action learning leadership development best practices:

1. The Mentor
   Mentoring is a skill — being a good manager does not automatically make someone an effective mentor. Inadequate or unwilling mentors can undermine employee engagement, development, performance, and retention.
   
   At a minimum, mentors should demonstrate integrity, embody organizational values, and have a genuine desire to support others. To be truly effective, mentors must also be accessible, possess relevant and up-to-date expertise, and excel in the skills needed to develop others. These include active listening, asking thoughtful open-ended questions, challenging and inspiring growth, modeling desired behaviors, advocating for mentees, facilitating networks, influencing positively, reflecting, and providing constructive feedback.
2. The Mentee
   Mentoring can take many forms, but an effective program provides resources to help mentees address challenges that cannot be solved through other channels.  Successful mentees are committed to the process, clear about their goals and the type of mentor they seek, open to learning, receptive to feedback, and willing to be held accountable.
   
   Clarity — often gained through self-assessments or 360-degree feedback — is essential. Some mentees benefit most from developing new skills, while others gain the most from navigating organizational dynamics, building strategic relationships, or tackling challenging stretch assignments. By understanding their own priorities and needs, mentees can maximize the value of the mentoring relationship.
3. The Mentor — Mentee Relationship
   Similar to an effective executive coaching relationship, a successful mentoring relationship requires alignment on outcomes and process. Both mentor and mentee should agree on when, where, and how often to meet, the purpose of their engagement, feedback expectations, and periods for reflection and re-evaluation.
   
   Experience shows that a degree of structure is essential to maximize the value of mentoring. At a minimum, a simple agreement should outline goals, success metrics, time and access commitments, and accountability milestones.
   
   Equally important is the mentor-to-mentee matching process. Clear goals, expectations, and processes make matching easier, but effective pairings also require mutual respect, trust, loyalty, accountability, shared values, and transparency. Investing time upfront in thoughtful matching significantly increases the likelihood of a meaningful and productive mentoring experience.
4. Cultural Alignment
   To unlock the full potential of mentoring, your workplace culture must actively support and reinforce the desired outcomes. Even the best-designed mentoring programs can falter if the culture is misaligned.
   
   Consider this: mentoring requires mentors to invest valuable time and energy in others. If your culture does not consistently enable, encourage, recognize, and reward mentoring, attempting to launch a formal program is unlikely to succeed.
   
   Building a mentoring culture goes far beyond pairing mentors and mentees. It means embedding mentoring values and behaviors into everyday work — making guidance, knowledge sharing, feedback, and development a natural part of how the organization operates.

The Bottom Line
Mentoring can deliver significant benefits when programs are thoughtfully supported, recognized, and actively monitored. Regularly check in with participants to ensure both mentors and mentees understand the value, remain committed, and are fully engaged in achieving meaningful outcomes.

To learn about how to develop others, download The Top 4 Coaching Mistakes to Avoid

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.