How to Implement a Mentoring Programme That Won’t Fall Apart

I’ve seen enough mentoring programmes die a slow, quiet death to know the pattern: someone has a good idea, there’s initial enthusiasm, a spreadsheet gets created, and six months later nobody’s using it, managers don’t know who’s mentoring whom, and the whole thing becomes another abandoned initiative that people reference in meetings with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

It doesn’t have to be this way, because mentoring works when it’s done properly. The research is solid: employees in mentoring programmes have retention rates 50% higher than those not involved (UMass Global, 2020), they’re promoted more often, they’re happier, and they develop skills that move the organisation forward. But mentoring doesn’t work automatically, and you can’t just tell people to “go forth and mentor” and expect magic to happen.

You need a proper approach. And yes, you’re going to need a platform.

Why Manual Administration Will Kill Your Programme

I know what some of you are thinking: “We’ll just use a spreadsheet.” Please don’t, because I’ve tried it, everyone’s tried it, and manual administration of mentoring programmes creates three immediate problems:

• nobody can find the right mentor,

• nobody tracks what’s happening,

• and nobody can see whether it’s working.

A platform solves this by allowing people to find mentors based on skills, goals, and availability, letting them record what they’re working on and track progress against actual KPIs, and enabling mentees to maintain notes, schedule sessions, and report back to their managers about what they’ve learned and how they’ve applied it. For the organisation, this creates visibility that’s completely absent in manual systems, because you can see who’s mentoring, what skills are being developed, and whether those skills align with where the business needs to go.

Alignment Is Everything

Before you launch anything, get clear on what you’re trying to achieve: what are your business objectives for the next quarter, six months, year, and what skills does your workforce need to develop to meet them? Your mentoring programme needs to connect to these questions, ensuring that when people spend time developing new capabilities, those capabilities are useful to the organisation’s future.

If you’re planning to expand into new markets, you want people developing relevant commercial skills; if you’re building your next generation of technical leaders, you want mentoring relationships that support that growth. This is where succession planning and mentoring must overlap, because the skills your future leaders need should be the skills your mentoring programme helps develop.

Get Your Mentors Ready

Having willing mentors is great, but having trained mentors is better. Before anyone starts mentoring, give them guidance on how to do it well through in-platform training, a workshop, or structured resources. Good mentoring is a skill, and assuming people will just know how to do it is optimistic at best.

What makes a good mentor? Research suggests five key characteristics:

• competence in relevant knowledge and skills,

• genuine commitment and initiative,

• strong interpersonal skills,

• a pro-social orientation,

• and a developmental mindset (Deng and Turner, 2024).

You can build support for all of these through proper preparation by making sure your mentors understand the time commitment, know how to ask good questions rather than just giving answers, and feel equipped to guide someone else’s development.

The other crucial point is that anyone can be a mentor to someone less experienced, because mentoring isn’t just for senior leaders. Your mid-level technical contributors can mentor junior team members, your new hires can reverse-mentor more tenured colleagues on contemporary tools and approaches, and opening this up properly means you’ll have a much richer pool of expertise to draw from.

Launch It Like You Mean It

Don’t expect everyone to adopt mentoring on day one, because you’re introducing something new, which means you need an internal marketing campaign. Run events about mentoring, share stories from early adopters, and create mechanisms for people to leave reviews or testimonials for their mentors, almost like an internal product page that makes the value visible and builds momentum.

Managers are critical here because they need to promote mentoring in one-to-one and career development conversations. If mentoring isn’t part of how managers talk about growth, it won’t become part of your culture, and you’ll end up with another well-intentioned programme that quietly fades away.

You’ll also need to address the elephant in the room: time. People need permission to use work time for mentoring, both as mentees and as mentors, and I’ve consistently found that when organisations trust their people with this time, they don’t abuse it. They use it to develop skills and progress their careers, but that trust has to be explicit. If mentoring feels like something people have to squeeze in around their “real” work, it won’t stick.

Make It Sustainable

Technology platforms help here by removing friction, sending reminders, and making it easy to book time, track goals, and see progress. They mean that when someone moves teams or a mentor becomes unavailable, the system doesn’t collapse, because you can find new matches, maintain continuity, and keep momentum going.

But the platform is just infrastructure, and the real sustainability comes from embedding mentoring into how your organisation thinks about development. When career conversations include mentoring, when skill gaps are addressed through mentor relationships, when succession planning explicitly references the mentoring programme, that’s when it becomes part of how you operate, rather than another initiative competing for attention.

I’m currently working on Tandemo to address the challenges I’ve encountered over the years. But regardless of which technology you use, the principles remain the same: make it easy to participate, ensure it connects to real organisational objectives, support your mentors properly, and give people the time and trust they need to make it work.

The organisations that get this right see measurable returns in better retention, faster skill development, and clearer succession pipelines. The ones that don’t often have a dusty spreadsheet somewhere and a vague sense that mentoring might be nice to have.

Which one do you want to be?

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References

Deng, C. and Turner, N. (2024) ‘Identifying key mentor characteristics for successful workplace mentoring relationships and programmes’, Personnel Review, 53(2), pp. 580–604.

UMass Global (2020) Exploring the mutual benefits of mentoring in the workplace.