How to be a better mentor: practical principles from the research

Executive overview

Most mentors receive no formal training, yet mentoring quality varies enormously. Ruth Gotian, co-author of the Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, draws on research with Nobel laureates, Olympians, and CEOs to identify what the best mentors actually do.

Informal mentoring outperforms formal programmes. The highest-impact moves — opening your network, listening to learn rather than to respond, and documenting progress — are simple but routinely skipped.

The mentor's core job is not to have all the answers but to open doors, hold perspective, and ask the questions the mentee cannot yet see.

Role model, mentor, coach, and sponsor — the four distinctions

• A role model is someone you wish to emulate; you may never meet them.
• A mentor is a long-term guide who shows possible paths and flags hidden obstacles.
• A coach addresses specific, short-term skill gaps (executive presence, promotion readiness).
• A sponsor advocates for you in rooms you are not in — throwing their reputation behind your name.
• In practice, one person can and should move between all four roles with the same person over time.
• Do not get distracted by the labels; the goal is doing good work and helping others.

Formal vs informal mentoring

• Only 14% of mentoring relationships start with a formal ask; 61% develop organically.
• Repeated research shows informal relationships are more effective than formal pairings.
• Formal programmes serve a critical role for under-mentored and underrepresented groups who lack organic access.
• Common failure modes: random matching, no exit ramp when the fit is wrong, no training for either party.
• Best practice: treat formal pairing as a starting point, not a fixed assignment; build an informal mentoring team alongside it.
• Do not limit yourself to one mentor — multiple mentors provide multiple perspectives.

Opening your network

• No single mentor holds all the answers; the mentee needs access to the mentor's network, not just the mentor.
• Each person knows roughly 250 people personally — a far more valuable asset than a LinkedIn connection count.
• Introducing a promising mentee to others reflects well on the mentor and compounds the mentee's access.
• Cross-industry introductions are especially high-value: the surgical checklist came from aviation, not medicine.

Listening for rather than listening to

• Most people listen to respond — which means shutting off comprehension to plan a reply.
• Effective mentors listen to learn and understand; their next sentence is a question, not an answer.
• Deeper listening produces better guidance because the mentor first grasps what is actually happening.

Parking your ego

• The mentor's job is to let the mentee's achievements shine, not to impress with their own.
• Sharing personal achievements is only useful when there is a clear reason it will help the mentee.
• A peer mentor who has permission to call this out is the most reliable check on ego creep.

The sophisticated barbarian

• A good mentor holds a helicopter view — knowledgeable enough to ask sophisticated questions, distant enough to see what insiders cannot.
• In academic practice, probing questions are how gaps in knowledge get identified and filled.
• To someone deep inside a project, these questions can feel harsh; the mentor should name this dynamic explicitly.
• When a mentee feels their situation is catastrophic, the mentor's perspective — "this is one notch in a long journey" — is often the most valuable thing they can offer.

Documenting progress

• Ask at the outset: "What would success look like for you?" Write it down.
• Without documentation, mentees reach milestones and immediately move on without recognising the achievement.
• Written records also counter imposter syndrome: concrete evidence of earned progress is hard to argue with.
• The FT Guide to Mentoring includes checklists and worksheets so there is nothing to invent from scratch.

Managing contact between meetings

• Encourage mentees to email questions rather than text, and to think them through before sending.
• Ask for updates labelled no response needed — this keeps the mentor informed without creating reply obligations.
• For time-sensitive matters, label accordingly and include context (e.g., "interview on Friday — anything I should consider?").
• The mentor can then decide whether a quick reply or a short call is needed.
• Set these norms at the start of the relationship so both parties know how to communicate.

Building a mentoring team

• Your manager can be a mentor but should not be your only one — conflicts of interest exist (jealousy, reluctance to lose a high performer).
• Aim for mentors inside and outside your organisation, inside and outside your industry.
• Peer mentors — people going through the same challenges — are underrated; collaboration naturally produces them.
• Organic peer mentorship can emerge from co-authorship and cross-discipline partnerships.