Does Mentoring Still Work?

Mentoring seems to be having its moment.

In the last 15 years, the number of Fortune 500 companies offering mentoring programs has increased from 70% to a whopping 98%, and every Fortune 50 company now has a mentoring program.

There is a reason for this: Mentoring programs appear to drive actual results. Companies with vibrant mentoring programs report that helping employees develop inside their organization is critical and that mentoring reduces employee turnover. These companies also report higher profitability than those not offering a mentoring program, though it is unclear if this is a correlation or causation.

However, despite this, our work at BillionMinds has revealed some signs that things are not going as well as they should. Today, I will discuss what we see in our work, what this means for the advice we give companies, and what it means for you as a mentee or mentor.

Before we get going, I should point out my own bias. I’m a huge fan of mentoring. I first became a workplace mentor at the grand old age of 26 (with a 50-year-old). In the last 25 years, I’ve been both mentor and mentee dozens of times, and I am still both. Last year, I had the most intense mentoring experience of my life when BillionMinds was accepted into the Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator (run by an amazing guide and mentor, Dave Cass). In one week, I had over 50 one-on-one meetings with potential mentors and ultimately settled on an incredible quartet of mentors who continue to help me on my journey.

Mentoring in 2025 – The Mentee View

At BillionMinds, our job is to understand the whole human at work and help them achieve their full potential. Mentoring is part of that picture, so we want to know if it works well.

And from our perspective, the picture is mixed.

The Good News:

The vast majority of mentees we have spoken to are very glad that a mentorship program exists and recognize the value that such a program brings. They know that it’s a privilege to be connected with people inside and outside their organization who have walked similar paths, and they particularly appreciate mentors who are willing to dive in and help them solve problems. The thing they appreciate MOST in 2025? Meaningful connections. To many of our mentees, the most important thing a mentor can do is be an ally invested in them and meaningfully connect them to others. We live in a hyper-connected world, but for many, that hyper-connectedness drowns out meaningful connections at work and beyond.

The Bad News:

This can be summarized in one simple phrase: The Urgent Displaces the Important.

I’ll return to this in a future newsletter, but it basically refers to the nature of unstructured, ambiguous work. When work is not clearly defined with a clear start and end, there is almost always more work to do than time to do it. The result? Non-urgent activities (like personal development activities) are deprioritized, deferred, and outright downgraded.

Unfortunately, many mentoring sessions fall into this category of important but not urgent. Our mentees often profoundly regret this, and we often hear, “I KNOW it’s important, but I never seem to be able to fit it in.”

This issue is exacerbated in low-trust environments amidst broader economic uncertainty. If employees are uncertain about their future, they often focus solely on the present, hoping this will keep them employed. Development—well, that can happen later.

Mentoring in 2025 – The Mentor View

One of the great things about our work is that we don’t just talk to the mentee, we talk to the mentor. It’s a complicated picture, but here’s a quick summary.

The Good News:

Almost every active mentor we have spoken to loves the experience. Often, they have had amazing experiences as a mentee, and are now discovering with excitement the other side of the equation. Many mentors talk about how much they learn and how it changes their day-to-day approach to work. Some are almost guilty that they have a better experience than the mentee, and often, it’s the most fun part of their week.

The Bad News:

Even these predominantly senior employees with more agency struggle with their own version of urgency vs. importance. They also have way more to do than time, and regret how this reduces their ability to make a difference. They know that mentoring is an amazing way to make a meaningful impact on others’ lives, while making a real difference in their companies — yet they still cannot execute in the way they would like.

But there is also something else—something new, at least in our findings. For a subset of our less optimistic mentors, we found a common theme. These mentors find it increasingly difficult to find a basic shared set of work values. As one mentor recently told me, “I used to feel a connection between how they think about work and how I once did, and now I don’t recognize how they feel at all!”

That’s a problem, because if you are going to be useful as a mentor, there has to be some basic set of values you can agree on – some underlying reason for the relationship. If not, then mentor and mentee end up just talking past each other.

Why This Matters

Work today is much more distributed. I’ll spare you the debate as to whether this is good or bad for now), but one thing is self-evident. Distributed work environments are different and need to be optimized differently.

One specific way in which this shows up is the lack of opportunity to “learn by osmosis.” If you started work in the 90s or 2000s, you often picked up the intangibles of work from just being in the same room as your colleagues. They subtly smoothed off your rough edges without you realizing it. But if you are rarely around your colleagues, learning by osmosis isn’t happening.

Mentoring can be part of the solution to this problem, but only if it works well. So let’s make sure it does.

How to do Mentoring in 2025

If mentoring is going to work well, you need to be intentional in how you use it. Here’s what we’ve seen work most effectively, from the perspective of the mentee, mentor and organization:

As a Mentee:

• Commit. Yes, you will be busy, but work is advancing so quickly that just executing on the essential stuff in front of your nose is a sure fire way to quickly become irrelevant. On the other hand, mentors help you think more strategically about your future and support you in finding that future so you can be helpful not just to yourself but your organization.
• Find the right mentors. They should challenge your thinking, and by and large, you should be okay with that. But there should also be enough chemistry for you to continue and deepen the relationship.
• Don’t be afraid of age/wisdom and seemingly ancient experience. There is a reason every tech futurist looks back at least 50 years. The past is full of clues that can help you if only you are willing to look.
• Don’t over-focus on job-specific matches. Most job titles around today won’t exist in 10 years. A mentor who matches your target job can be great for connections, but in general, the most valuable mentors have excellent, durable skills, a different perspective, and a willingness to problem-solve alongside you.
• Make yourself easy to be mentored. Send follow-ups to meetings with summaries of action items, send forwardable e-mails they can use for introductions, and express your thanks for their help.
• Don’t expect the world – mentors are not responsible for every aspect of your growth. They are predominantly there to share their experiences, problem-solve with you, and connect you to people who can help you grow
• Quality over quantity. Great mentor/mentee relationships build over time, so invest in the relationship
• But if there is no match, move on (but don’t give up). A particular relationship may not have worked, but it doesn’t mean mentoring doesn’t work.

As a Mentor:

• Commit – a half-hearted mentor is of little use to anyone. Are you here to help your mentee(s), or are you just checking a box? If it’s the former, lean into the relationship, and you will not just help the mentee; you will gain knowledge and understanding of yourself. And if you are choosing between more mentees or deeper relationships, our research suggests you can make more impact with the latter.
• Create a bidirectional relationship – the most successful mentors we’ve met understand what they themselves will get from the relationship while still helping the mentee. That could be as direct as understanding a new technology, gaining a human perspective they rarely encounter, or simply finding a new thinking partner.
• Network – Once you are confident your mentee is reliable, bring them into your network. This is the thing mentees often need the most, particularly in a world where they cannot just walk down the corridor to meet someone new. In some cases, your introduction may lead to your mentee “leaving you” for a better fit, and if they do, that’s a success.
• Avoid over-functioning. As a mentor, you are not responsible for every aspect of your mentees’ growth and development. Do your mentoring job well, and it will likely keep you valuable for longer.

As an Organization

• Avoid over-engineering – you may think you have the perfect way to match mentors and mentees (often based on technical skills), but you cannot truly predict in advance. Instead, invest in ways that mentors and mentees can get to know each other efficiently, and leave it to them to determine if there is a great fit
• Educate both mentors and mentees – in many cases, neither know how to do this well. We offer masterclasses on how to be a great mentor, and also how to be a great mentee. In most cases, we find both parties are winging it.
• Don’t expect mentoring to be a cure-all. Mentoring is part of a much bigger picture of the network of people employees need to learn and grow.

Next Week….

I’ll examine how mentoring fits into the bigger picture of learning and growing in unstructured, ambiguous workplaces.

See you then!