Read the article on Harvard Business Review
Over the course of her 15-year career with BT Group and its subsidiaries, Maria Tsierkezos reached senior roles in the marketing team, eventually becoming the Global Head of Partnership and Portfolio Marketing for BT Business. It took, however, a key conversation to set her on the right path.
When Maria was overlooked for a promotion early in her career, she felt blindsided. Her results were strong, and she believed that performance alone would speak for her. Her manager’s feedback was brief but revealing: “I can’t give you this yet.”
That single word—yet—sparked the first mentoring relationship of Maria’s career, one that transformed not just her prospects but her understanding of what fuels professional growth.
Maria spoke to her manager, Sarah, to clarify what was needed for her to progress. And while Sarah explained that Maria wasn’t yet demonstrating the behaviours required for a more senior role, she also said she didn’t feel personally that she was the right person to provide Maria with the support she needed, as she was focused on Maria’s technical performance. Instead, she arranged a meeting with Kayla, the Director of Marketing, who stepped in and offered to personally mentor Maria.
Kayla worked with Maria on several key areas related to her mindset and behaviours at work. Kayla noted that Maria had a tendency to force her way through challenges rather than approaching them more strategically. They examined how she could move from “bulldozing” them to navigating them more carefully. In addition, Kayla helped Maria to develop a more flexible mindset. They worked on her soft skills, developing leadership and interpersonal behaviors that would serve her in a more senior role.
As a result of Kayla’s mentoring, Maria developed a heightened sense of self-awareness and an ability to reflect on her instinctive responses. Eighteen months later, she achieved the promotion she had previously missed out on and enjoyed a long and successful career with the company.
Despite her strong performance and ambition, Maria was unaware that mentoring was an option for her, having never been offered it before. ”Nobody ever mentioned mentoring or coaching,” she told me in an interview. “And why would they, when everything seemed to be going well for me?”
The Benefits of Mentorship for All
Maria’s experience highlights a common organisational blind spot: Many high-performing employees are left to navigate their development alone, assuming results will naturally lead to progression. In reality, they often need the feedback, perspective, and challenge that mentoring provides.
Despite widespread availability—92% of medium and large UK companies offer mentoring, according to the Association of Business Mentors (ABM); and 98% of Fortune 500 companies offered visible mentoring programs in 2024, according to MentoricliQ—actual uptake remains low. Gartner found that only 24% of employees use the programs available to them. Global surveys show similar patterns: Employees cite time pressures, unclear expectations, limited training, and poor program visibility as reasons they do not participate.
Some groups benefit more than others. High-potential employees, identified and fast-tracked for future leadership positions, are more likely to be offered mentors. But this selective approach misses the wider opportunity.
The evidence points to broader gains when mentoring is accessible to all. A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behavior found strong correlations between mentoring, job performance, and career satisfaction across industries worldwide. A long-term Sun Microsystems study reported that mentees were promoted at more than twice the rate of non-participants and found mentoring delivered an ROI of “1000% or better.” Seventy percent of HR leaders in the ABM survey said mentoring enhanced business performance.
Mentoring also strengthens confidence, decision-making, and collaboration—early indicators of productivity—and broadens networks for younger employees who might otherwise be stuck in narrow circles. Research consistently finds that employees with mentors are more engaged, more productive, and more likely to stay.
To capture these benefits fully, companies need to shift from mentoring a select few to embedding it as a performance strategy within a mentoring culture.
How to Create a Culture of Mentorship
Running a mentoring program is different from fostering a mentoring culture. The former is a tactical process with a clear start and finish involving specific participants. Naturally, this lends itself to offering it to specific people, some of which opt in while others don’t. A mentoring culture, on the other hand, permeates the entire organisation and is referred to by everyone. It fosters a wider appreciation and understanding across the company, encouraging more people to participate, both as mentees and mentors. And by spreading the expectation of mentorship across the organization, all employees—and the company itself—reap the rewards.
In other words, where a mentoring program helps individuals grow, a mentoring culture helps organisations grow. Ensuring access to, and participation in, mentoring programs by a broader part of the population leads to more dynamic and evolved businesses.
Leaders ought to recognise mentoring as a strategic instrument that goes beyond talent development and retention, aligning it with other goals such as boosting productivity. When targets are not being achieved, they should consider how mentors can enable key staff with confidence, tactics, and perspectives to adapt their approach effectively.
To create a culture of mentorship, leaders can take several steps.
Broaden access
Shift from opt-in to opt-out mentoring so support becomes a default. Instead of imposing strict selection criteria, adopt a mentoring-for-all approach, where everyone in the organisation is assigned a mentor and mentee and must explicitly declare if they do not wish to participate. Reverse and peer mentoring are integrated into the mentoring culture as much as traditional hierarchical mentoring. New hires are automatically allocated a mentor as part of their onboarding, and participation becomes normalised, both as a mentee and as a mentor.
Embed mentoring into performance and development conversations
Mentoring should form part of each individual’s support and development, rather than treating it as a standalone initiative. Ensure that line managers are trained to identify when key development needs could be served through mentoring conversations and explore progress in appraisal and check-in conversations.
While mentoring conversations should remain protected and confidential, managers should be aware of who is mentoring their reports internally and, where the mentee is comfortable and gives their permission, be able to discuss progress, recommendations, and future objectives directly with mentors.
Measure outcomes both individually and organisationally
Encourage mentors and mentees to set clear objectives from the outset and regularly review and reframe them when needed. Clarify which goals can be linked to measurable outcomes and which rely on observing step-by-step progress in skills or behaviours.
To connect individual mentoring progress to the overall organisational objectives, it helps to build a strong narrative for the importance of networking across the community and demonstrate a clear return on investment, linking mentoring engagement to retention, mobility, and well-being data.
Require senior leaders to mentor beyond their direct teams
Two of the prime qualities of a good mentor are their objectivity and their ability to make their mentee feel comfortable enough to share transparently. These are both hard to achieve when conflicts of interest are present. Mentors should therefore not be in the mentee’s direct reporting line or involved in the mentee’s day-to-day work.
By creating mentoring relationships across different functions and parts of the organisation, where a leader in operations may mentor a rising manager in marketing and an administrator in finance reverse mentors the CEO, leaders also create the added benefit of more cross-functional relationship-building and broader institutional learning.
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Organisations that democratise mentoring consistently outperform those that restrict it to a select few. When mentoring becomes a fundamental part of the company culture, employees develop more quickly, teams collaborate more effectively, and companies foster a more resilient leadership pipeline.