Mentoring has long been seen as a powerful lever for engagement, development and retention in the workplace. And with good reason. When done well, mentoring can change the trajectory of a career. It can also shift the culture of an entire organisation. Still, many mentoring programs don’t hit the mark. And for HR leaders, that presents both a challenge and an opportunity.
So why do so many mentoring programs fail to deliver the impact employees hope for?
Maud Lindley, Founder and CEO of MentorKey, addressed this question in a recent podcast episode with HR Leader. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience in designing and facilitating mentoring programs for leading Australian organisations, Maud shared some of the hard truths HR teams need to confront if they want mentoring to be impactful, not just a box-ticking exercise.
The Expectation Gap
One of the biggest issues is the mismatch in expectations. Employees are asking for more mentoring. In fact, 76% of people think mentors are important, but only 37% have one (Forbes). And when those programs are launched without enough structure or support, the experience can feel underwhelming or even disappointing.
Mentees often go into their sessions expecting their mentor to provide the magic solution to their challenges or the answers to their complex questions. The reality is that mentors will answer the questions that mentees have prepared but they won’t be magic. Mentors will share their stories or offer suggestions to their mentee’s issues. It may be interesting for the mentee to hear this. However, if the mentee has not articulated clear goals, if they are not prepared to take action at the back of the advice provided by their mentor and if there is no follow-up on the discussion, the mentoring partnership will often fall flat.
As Maud explains, “What starts with excitement can quietly fizzle out. And that disappointment carries consequences.” Because mentees don’t need answers, they need personal guides to help them find their own solutions and then support them to find the confidence to take action and step outside their comfort zone. Most often, mentees don’t know how to articulate this, and mentors are unsure of the role they can play beyond sharing their own experience.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workforce Learning Report identified “Inspiring Individual Career Growth” as one of the 5 talent foundations to accelerate career-driven learning. “Career development flourishes when employees feel in control of their careers and are inspired to build their own best future. Organisations can offer tools and support systems that help employees identify their unique strengths, set career goals, pursue skill-building, and access internal mobility opportunities. The payoff: a workforce motivated to learn new skills — and an organisation ready to adapt and thrive today and tomorrow.”
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
When mentoring programs fail to meet expectations, it doesn’t just impact the individuals involved. It can damage the organisation’s learning culture. Employees may be less inclined to participate in future initiatives. Mentors may feel their time wasn’t used meaningfully. And HR teams lose a valuable lever for talent development and engagement.
Worse, a poorly supported mentoring program can create the illusion that the organisation “tried mentoring and it didn’t work” — when in fact, what didn’t work was the lack of structure, clarity, and support.
What Makes Mentoring Work
If you want mentoring to be transformational, not transactional, you implement a few key components:
1. Make it a cultural commitment, not a one-off project. A strong mentoring culture starts with a well-supported pilot and builds over time. As Maud shared, “When you invest in quality mentoring at the start, it becomes easier to scale. You build expectations into the culture.” Mentoring is not an exercise where mentees extract knowledge from their mentors. It is an exercise where mentees invest time in their own development, are prepared to put in the extra work and be vulnerable with a senior leader. It is an exercise where the mentor holds the space and shines the light on the mentee’s deepest challenges and aspirations. When the pilot program sets this culture, your future programs will run more easily because mentors will know what to expect and mentees will commit only if they are prepared to put in this type of work.
2. Create accountability between sessions. Whilst new perspectives and insights are often unlocked during conversations, growth happens between sessions. Encourage both mentors and mentees to identify actions or reflections to pursue between each session. This keeps partners accountable to each other and provides the opportunity for practical application of ideas and concepts discussed during sessions.
3. Support mentees to be active participants. Mentees need help setting clear goals for the partnership and understanding that the conversation is not about extracting advice from their mentor, but about exploring their own growth. To do this successfully, they need to be provided with tools and resources to help them self-reflect and define what they’re wanting to achieve. At MentorKey, our team of leadership development experts created a series of guided self-reflections on a range of topics; to support both mentors and mentees, we call these ‘Keys’.
4. Equip mentors with the right mindset and tools. Great mentors aren’t advisors. They’re partners in reflection and enquiry. They’re skilled in how to ask powerful questions to help their mentee communicate what’s important to them, their perspectives, and what may be holding them back. Sure, sharing a meaningful career story can help reinforce a perspective. But great mentoring is less about giving advice and more about holding space for uncertainty and guiding without prescribing.
5. Establish trust and confidentiality. Mentees need to feel safe to have vulnerable and open conversations. That means both parties need to set a clear commitment to confidentiality and mutual respect. Whilst this can take time to build and feel more natural over the first few sessions, it’s important for this to be established from the outset.
The Role of HR
For HR leaders, the role isn’t simply to set up a mentoring program and let it run. It’s to shape a culture where quality mentoring is expected, supported and valued. That means:
- Positioning mentoring as a strategic lever for growth and inclusion
- Ensuring mentors and mentees are equipped and supported, not just matched
- Measuring outcomes and evolving the approach over time.
At MentorKey, we believe mentoring should enable growth, not just in skills, but in self-awareness, leadership, and confidence. That’s why our platform supports structured, self-reflective mentoring conversations at scale.
If you’re launching or refining a mentoring program, ask yourself: Are we setting people up for success? Or are we handing them the keys without teaching them how to drive?
The answer could make all the difference.
Want support building mentoring programs that actually work? Get in touch with the MentorKey team to explore how we can help.