How to build a mentoring culture

By now, there’s absolutely no question that mentoring is an essential part of any workplace learning strategy. 

Global employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report — a decline that makes mentoring's role in keeping people invested in their own development harder to ignore.

But there's a distinct difference between a mentoring programme that happens sporadically, and a deeply-embedded mentoring culture; something that everyone in the organisation can innately feel.

So, what does that look like in practical terms?
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What a mentoring culture actually means

A mentoring culture exists when people seek out and offer guidance as a normal part of how they work, independent of whether a formal scheme is running at the time.

This can look like a senior employee who takes junior colleagues under their wing without being asked, or managers who model mentoring behaviour in their own working relationships.

A mentoring programme is the delivery mechanism: the structure, matching process, and cadence that gets mentoring started. A mentoring culture is the outcome, where that behaviour continues even without the formal programme.

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Why organisations struggle to move beyond a single mentoring programme

A lack of training

The first pitfall to watch out for is a lack of training – and this goes for both mentor and mentee.

Professor David Clutterbuck is the co-founder of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and a mentoring researcher for more than four decades, and his research found that seniority level doesn't equate to success as a mentor; there also needs to be formal training in place.

Here's what Professor Clutterbuck's research found:

Without any training, the best he's seen a scheme achieve is 30% of relationships delivering significant value to one or both parties. With training for mentors only, that roughly doubles to 60–65%. Training both mentors and mentees, and educating other influencers such as line managers, pushes the figure above 90%.

"Seniority in the organisation and ability as a mentor do not necessarily go together."

— Professor David Clutterbuck

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Poor matching criteria

When it comes to creating effective mentoring programmes, don't fall into the trap of convenience. The fact that a junior colleague works in the same department as a senior one does not automatically mean that they'll be a good match.

If the mentee wants to improve a specific skill such as public speaking or stakeholder management, pairing them with someone because of proximity won't help them achieve those goals.

Effective mentor-matching starts with the mentee's specific development goals and works backwards to find someone equipped to support them, even if that means looking outside their immediate team.

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A lack of structure

Funnily enough, if something lacks structure to give it shape, it falls apart.

We've all witnessed the initial excitement that builds around a new campaign or initiative. Banners, effusive Slack messages, and company-wide announcements crowd the initiative in fanfare, which soon gives way to silence. As soon as the initiative is off the ground, with no structure to support it, it falls flat.

Without that scaffolding in place the initial enthusiasm has nothing to hold onto, and neither mentor nor mentee is quite sure what happens next.

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Time isn't protected

It's all well and good running a mentoring programme – but if people have no time to complete it, you may as well not run it at all. Mentoring shouldn't feel like something that people have to desperately scramble to find time for or complete after hours. If you truly want the programme to take off, there needs to be protected time built in.

Mentoring often gets treated as something to squeeze in around "real work", so sessions get rescheduled and eventually abandoned. When leadership doesn't visibly protect that time, employees read that silence as a message: mentoring isn't actually a priority, whatever the launch announcement said.
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The foundations a mentoring culture needs

A mentoring culture rests on leadership actually taking part as mentors, rather than authorising the programme and stepping back from it.

Goals need to tie directly to skills or career pathways, so mentees and mentors both know what the relationship is working towards rather than treating it as a loosely defined check-in.

Finding and matching a mentor should take minutes rather than weeks, with enough flexibility to match people across teams when that's what the mentee's goal actually calls for. The fastest way to make that happen is building matching directly into the same learning platform where training already runs, rather than bolting on a separate system.

Recognition matters just as much as any of this: people who mentor others need to see that effort acknowledged, whether through how performance conversations are framed or simply through colleagues and leaders naming it as valuable work, rather than treating participation itself as the only thing worth measuring.

And measurement needs to go well beyond attendance figures, capturing whether mentoring is changing outcomes like retention, internal mobility, and how people talk about their own development.
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Making mentoring easy to start

With all that in mind, how do you get started?

Reducing friction is what turns interest into action. A matching process that requires lengthy forms, weeks of waiting, or navigating a system built for HR reporting will put people off before they've had a single conversation. Flexible formats help here: peer mentoring between colleagues at a similar level, reverse mentoring where junior employees mentor senior leaders on specific skills or perspectives, and group mentoring where one mentor supports several mentees at once.

Cutting the administrative burden on participants matters too. Starting a mentoring relationship should feel like sending a message, not submitting a request. The easier the entry point, the more likely people are to seek out mentoring without needing to be formally assigned into it.

Learn more about how mentoring could benefit your organisation. Book a demo today.

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FAQs

How do you build a mentoring culture at work?

Building a mentoring culture at work starts with leadership visibly participating as mentors, followed by clear mentor training, low-friction matching, and mentoring being embedded into everyday management rather than run as a standalone HR initiative. The behaviour needs to extend beyond the formal programme, becoming something employees choose to do rather than something they're assigned into.

What is the difference between a mentoring programme and a mentoring culture?

A mentoring programme is the delivery mechanism: the structure, matching process, and cadence that gets mentoring started. A mentoring culture is the outcome, where mentoring behaviour continues once the formal structure steps back, and employees seek out or offer guidance without needing a scheme to prompt them.

How do you get leadership involved in mentoring?

Leadership becomes involved in mentoring when senior figures mentor others themselves and speak openly about the mentors who've supported their own careers. This visible participation signals that mentoring is expected across the organisation rather than an optional activity delegated to junior employees.

What makes a mentoring programme fail?

Mentoring programmes commonly fail due to a lack of mentor and mentee training, poor matching based on convenience rather than the mentee's development goals, insufficient structure after launch, unprotected time for mentoring conversations, and no way to measure or demonstrate impact. Professor David Clutterbuck's research found that structured mentoring programmes without training see only 30% of relationships deliver real value, a figure that rises above 90% once both mentors and mentees are trained.

How do you measure a mentoring culture?

A mentoring culture is measured by signals that go beyond formal programme sign-ups, including informal mentoring requests that happen without HR involvement, mentoring relationships forming across teams, retention and internal mobility data, and managers reporting behaviour change in how their teams support one another.