Mentorship Makeover: Designing Programs With Impact

A good mentor can be hard to find. But the impact of effective mentoring on individual career growth and an organization’s strategic objectives can be priceless.

Recent research supports this declarative statement, highlighting the benefits that mentorship can bring to an organization. For instance, survey findings from the 2025 Insight Special Feature, “The Readiness Divide: How Next-Gen Accounting Talent Measures Up,” found that both early-career professionals and managers nearly equally believe mentorship is an important tool for skill development, indicating that it might be the key to closing the skills gap that employers have consistently flagged. Additionally, in a 2025 Society for Human Resource Management report, “The Price of Success: Navigating the Tradeoffs That Shape Career Growth,” more than half of workers said they feel strongly motivated to persevere through career adversity when they have a mentor or sponsor.

Carla McCall, CPA, CGMA, managing partner at AAFCPAs, an accounting and consulting firm based in Westborough, Mass., says successful mentoring and coaching programs have the potential to help employees overcome adversity and maximize their engagement and also build community and bridge gaps between leaders and more junior staff.

Although mentors have long played a role in developing and retaining talent at certified public accounting (CPA) firms, mentorship programs often fall short in terms of participation, reach, accountability, and management. That’s why growth-minded firms are reimagining their programs and exploring new ways to support employees at all stages of their careers.

New Approaches to Mentoring

According to Jenn Labin, author of “Mentoring Programs That Work” and coach at Rocket Brain Coaching in Sykesville, Md., traditional one-on-one mentorship programs yield effective results, but incorporating elements from other models can help firms expand their reach to varied employee groups and provide alternatives to one-size-fits-all frameworks. Here are a few to consider.

Reverse Mentoring

One alternative model is reverse mentoring, where junior employees serve as mentors to more senior leaders. While not a new approach, it’s become more popular in recent years, especially with organizations that want to be known for emphasizing learning opportunities.

Eileen Linnabery, Ph.D., a partner and executive coach at Chicago-based Vantage Leadership Consulting, says that reverse mentoring can be effective for organizations that want to make it clear to their employees that everyone is expected to be contemporary in knowledge: “A reverse mentorship program demonstrates the expectation that everyone should be constantly learning and shows that leaders are taking time to learn from more junior or inexperienced staff.”

The reverse mentorship model is also popular because the benefits go both ways. “Junior employees can gain insight into how leaders think and learn what’s important to them, as well as obtain a broader sense of what it means to lead within the organization,” Labin says. “On the other side, leaders can gain exposure to new ways of thinking and get a better sense of the experiences of their junior employees.”

Labin also notes that reverse mentoring can be a powerful tool for engaging with underrepresented populations: “When people are invited to help with the growth journey of more senior colleagues, the firm demonstrates that they’re valued for the different experiences they bring.”

Group Mentoring

Oftentimes, scale can be a challenge for firms that want to build inclusive mentoring programs. One way to get around this barrier is to offer group mentoring, a time-effective way to expand the reach of a mentoring program beyond formal, one-on-one meetings.

“You can’t ask your partners to mentor everyone,” Linnabery cautions. “Instead, take a precious few of the most senior folks and build strategic programs that make good use of their time.”

Linnabery suggests having leaders host quarterly fireside chats or other sessions that are open to the entire mentorship program: “That way everyone gets to ask questions and hear stories in an intimate group setting and have exposure to the leaders.”

Some CPA firms are also using group mentoring programs to support team members through the CPA exam process. For example, McCall says that AAFCPAs’ Zip2CPA Program, designed to help accounting professionals accelerate the process of earning their CPA credential, is led by an adjunct professor who provides group coaching and study sessions.

Peer Mentoring

Another approach for supporting employees is through peer mentoring, where individuals of similar ages or experience levels support each other’s growth and development.

“Every single person has something to offer to other people. Even if it’s a person’s first day in the professional workforce, there’s something in their experience and expertise that others can learn from,” Labin says.

One benefit to this approach is that it can fill in the gaps that come with relationship-based learning without depleting an organization’s mentor pool.

To make use of this mentoring model, Linnabery suggests that when firms bring people together for trainings, they set the expectation that everyone becomes a peer mentor. After holding a group training, for example, she suggests challenging pairs and trios to carry the lessons forward.

Executive Coaching

For some firms, a limited mentor pool can be the biggest obstacle to creating successful programs. After all, not everyone wants to be a mentor and not everyone has a knack for mentoring.

“It can be really hard to get folks to want to act as a mentor,” Linnabery says. “Being asked to spend six to 12 months with someone can feel like quite a chore. And just because someone volunteered to be a mentor doesn’t mean they’re good at it.”

McCall agrees—especially when it comes to accountants: “We’re not always good at coaching. We fit it in when we have time. Client crises will always take priority. Accountants are good at client work, but we don’t always know how to read signs and body language and get at the root of retention problems.”

That’s where executive coaches can come in. Linnabery says the idea of hiring executive coaches is increasingly gaining traction, especially for leadership development and career counseling. Her firm, for example, offers a career counseling framework that helps executives maximize their potential and satisfaction with work, while also meeting the needs of the market, industry, employers, and customers.

Some organizations also are hiring in-house executive coaches to provide customized and confidential career support. McCall notes that AAFCPAs has several internal executive coaches that everyone in the firm can engage with who are fully dedicated to that role: “We needed our coaches to be immersed in our culture and have 100% focus on our people.”

AAFCPAs’ coaches provide a range of ongoing support and guidance, such as helping employees improve their communication skills, deliver critical feedback, navigate difficult conversations, set goals, and chart their career paths. “Our coaches have helped people have candid conversations with others and move around in the firm,” McCall says. “We’ve kept talent because of them.”

Although providing access to executive and leadership coaching can come with a high price tag, Labin says more firms are recognizing the positive impact of these investments: “The resulting behavior changes and growth we see in employees are so much stronger and more sustainable than any other development tool. It builds the entire skill set and helps people get to where they want to go. The investment in the employee creates so much engagement for them and makes them a stronger player, so the return on that investment just keeps growing.”

Notably, artificial intelligence (AI) may expand affordable access to coaching. Though, as Labin warns, the capabilities may be limited, and organizations would need to consider the associated risks and regulations that come with using it.

“There’s certainly a race to find AI coaches and tools. What currently exists can be helpful in some areas, but I don’t see it replacing human coaches or mentors and the people that oversee the processes and experiences to make sure they’re valuable for employees,” Labin says. “I think there’s a role for the technology in the coaching and mentoring space, but not as a replacement for relationship-based learning.”

Tips for Deploying Successful Mentorship Programs

Regardless of the mentorship model implemented (or mix of models), firms can boost the impact of their programs by keeping these five best practices in mind.

1. Build for the Program’s Purpose

Labin recommends identifying the intention first and then choosing the shape of the program based on its purpose. “If the goal is to expand networks or build community, for example, group mentoring can be an efficient way to achieve that purpose with lower administration needs,” she explains. “For onboarding or leadership development, where a lot goes on behind the scenes for the mental and emotional state of the people participating, then a one-on-one format would be important.”

2. Set Clear Expectations

To avoid uncertainty about what a mentor should or shouldn’t do, organizations need to help mentors feel prepared and confident in their roles. As Linnabery notes, even excellent mentors need to be trained on the firm’s expectations for the relationships.

Labin suggests that communication and information sharing with everyone involved can help ease hesitancy, prevent confusion, and build psychological safety within the relationships: “I’m a big fan of having one resource and one launch event to share the same information with everybody, because then mentees have total clarity on what mentors are expected to do and vice versa.”

3. Make It a Win-Win

Mentorship program administrators shouldn’t be afraid to ask someone to mentor.

“Sometimes there’s a fear that people won’t mentor if they’re being asked to do too much,” Linnabery notes. “But a progressive approach to solving that problem is to make sure there’s something in it for them as mentors.”

She says firms should encourage all participants to identify strong goals and what they want to get out of the relationship: “Maybe the mentor wants to better understand their up-and-coming talent so they can grow their teams better, while the mentee wants to learn a new process, system, or approach to doing the work.”

4. Find a Balance of Structure and Freedom

According to Linnabery, the best mentoring programs are those that create natural engagement: “Implementing too many reporting requirements creates too many tasks. But at the same time, you don’t want to leave people to their own devices, as they may not know where to begin.”

Conversation guides and other tools can help create the right balance. In a one-to-one model, for example, guides can provide a starting point for conversations, such as how to get a promotion, overcome a disagreement, or respond to critical feedback. “It’s important to provide some tools and structure to make sure everyone’s getting the most out of their conversations, but also allow some freedom and choice,” Linnabery stresses.

She also advises against overcomplicating mentor-mentee matching: “Don’t create extensive formulas for matching people. You don’t need people to be colleagues for life. Random matches are just as likely to be successful as a highly prescriptive match.”

Labin also recommends considering the maturity of the mentorship program. “If mentoring is already a well-established practice and has high participation, then the program may not need as much structure,” she explains. “If there’s more work to be done to get mentoring adopted throughout the organization and seen as a key part of the talent strategy, then more structure is better.” But she adds the caveat that structure shouldn’t create a lot of unnecessary hassle for participants, and decisions shouldn’t be made for the purpose of checking a box.

5. Get Creative

As organizations look for opportunities to customize their mentorship programs, Linnabery says they should also have fun with the process: “Think about ways you can incorporate your company culture into your mentorship programs—be playful with it.” As an example, Linnabery says one of her clients created a theme around a leader’s hobby.

If your firm doesn’t follow any of these best practices, perhaps it’s time for a mentorship makeover. After all, when organizations commit to moving beyond the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach to mentorship and instead create programs with real purpose and intention, they don’t just support individual development, they build a foundation for long-term organizational growth.

Clare Fitzgerald is a freelance writer covering the accounting, finance, and insurance industries.

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