Why Mentoring Isn't a Soft Skill

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Creating environments where people grow, contribute meaningfully, and want to stay.

This is an article in Enable Great Conversations - a series unpacking the leadership challenges behind technology decisions, exploring how clarity and confidence can be built through open conversation and experience.

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Mentoring often gets lumped in with the 'people stuff' - soft skills that sit alongside rather than at the core of a technical leadership role. It becomes the thing you do "when you've got time", "when the urgent work is done", or "when delivery pressure eases".

Except, as many who have been there will tell you, that moment never comes.

So, mentoring gets deferred or deprioritised - often treated as optional development work rather than foundational team leadership. The assumption is that capable people will figure it out on their own, or that technical skill alone will be enough.

It isn't.

There's a gap - often a significant one - between what organisations expect from technically capable teams, and what those teams can deliver without guidance. Not because people lack ability, but because capability without context, support, and structured development only gets you so far.

Mentoring isn't a soft skill. It's how you help people grow, go from executing tasks to making judgment calls, and from feeling uncertain to feeling trusted. If you get it right, you'll unlock capability you didn't know existed. Get it wrong though, and watch talented people disengage, stagnate, or leave - often before you realise why.

When Mentoring is Absent

Let's be clear about what happens when mentoring is absent: people suffer and feel undervalued.

They feel stuck; uncertain whether they're on the right track, anxious about escalating upwards too often, and worried that they'll be seen as lacking initiative. They second-guess themselves - not because they don’t have the ability, but because they lack the reassurance that comes from working alongside someone who's been there before.

This shows up in how they work.

Technical skill gets you execution, but executing without judgment creates frustration - for the people doing the work, and for those depending on it. Teams that lack a focus on mentoring often struggle with the harder questions: what matters here? Where should we push back? They can struggle when requirements shift or priorities aren't clear because their environment doesn’t enable the confidence to navigate ambiguity or to challenge assumptions.

This leads to a culture of caution over confidence. People stop taking initiative because the risk of being wrong - or being seen as wrong - feels too high. They wait for direction rather than proposing solutions. They deliver what's asked, but stop sharing ideas that could make things better…

Technical capability isn’t enough on its own. Without guided experience, people default to what they know - often technically sound, but not always connected to the broader picture, organisational context, the commercial reality, or the strategic direction.

More importantly, working this way is draining. People want to contribute meaningfully, they want to understand how their work fits into something bigger, and they want to feel confident and trusted. Mentoring creates that environment and is a huge component in helping people to move from feeling capable, to feeling valued.

Mentoring reverses this. Psychological safety - the confidence that you're supported, not just monitored, and that your development matters is what enables people to do their best work. Not because they're being optimised for productivity, but because they genuinely want to contribute.

Context over Credentials

Confidence isn't something you're born with, or gain through learning alone. It's built through experience and guided by those who help you to see that uncertainty is normal and navigable.

Junior and mid-level consultants or engineers often have the technical ability but lack the confidence to really own their work. This causes bottlenecks, escalations, and dependency on senior leadership.

Mentoring provides the scaffolding that allows people to stretch themselves without fear, and without breaking.

It's guided problem-solving that builds pattern recognition - helping people to see not just the solution, but the thinking that led to it. It's about creating a safe space to make mistakes and learn from them, where failure is feedback rather than career risk. It's calibrating what "good enough" looks like in different contexts, so that people learn when to commit, and when to refine - reinforcing that ambiguity is normal, not a sign of inadequacy.

This doesn't happen through training courses or documentation. It happens through proximity, repetition, and deliberate reflection. Someone more experienced walking alongside someone less so, helping them see what they're not yet able to notice.

Without good mentoring, teams wait for permission. With it, they learn to lead. That shift - from execution to ownership - creates consistency and confidence. It's the difference between a team that can follow a plan, and a team that can adapt when the plan meets reality.

The Hidden Cost of Not Investing in People

The time you spend developing good judgment today ensures the capability that reduces overhead tomorrow.

Conversely, neglecting the need to mentor leads to capability debt - a dependency on a small number of people, and a growing gap between what the business needs and what the team can deliver.

It's remarkably easy to let this happen.

Business-as-usual pressures are relentless; delivery deadlines don't move, incidents need resolving and stakeholders need reassuring. As a result the thing that isn't urgent today gets pushed to next week, next month, next quarter….

I've been guilty of this myself. In previous roles, I've prioritised immediate delivery pressures over the slower, less visible work of developing the people around me. At the time, it felt like the right trade-off, but by the time I realised the cost, it was too late. Team members who could have grown into confident leaders instead became frustrated, waiting for direction that didn’t come. The capability debt I'd been accumulating reared its head - but more painfully, I'd let people down. The cost wasn't just operational, it was personal.

This isn't just about individual growth - it's about organisational resilience.

When capability is concentrated in one or two people, those people become bottlenecks. Every significant choice requires their input, and every moment of pressure falls disproportionately on them. Eventually, they burn out, leave, or both - and the organisation discovers too late that the capability they relied on wasn't distributed, but hoarded by necessity.

Mentoring ultimately spreads that capability. It diminishes key person risk as capability becomes distributed rather than centralised, and it makes delivery more predictable as teams develop shared judgment about what matters, and it allows the business to scale without leadership becoming a constraint.

Leaders who treat mentoring as optional are borrowing against future capacity, and sooner or later the accumulated cost surfaces. The irony is that the leaders who feel they don't have time to mentor are often the ones who need it the most…

You Can't Transform What You Can't Sustain

Every technology transformation ultimately depends on people. Platforms, architectures, and strategies only succeed if teams can operate them confidently.

Organisations that invest heavily in tools and processes but neglect capability building end up with expensive platforms that aren't used effectively, processes that are followed rigidly (rather than applied intelligently), and initiatives that fail because their teams lack the judgment to navigate complexity effectively.

This is where the "soft skill" framing is dangerous. It implies that mentoring is supplementary to the hard work of technology transformation. The reality is the opposite: mentoring can enable transformation success.

In truth, mentoring it isn't separate from technology leadership it's inseparable from it. If you're not developing your people, you're not leading. You're managing.

Beyond the Business Case

Strip away the business case for a moment and focus on what mentoring creates: people who feel seen, supported, and capable of more than they thought possible.

It creates environments where mistakes are learning opportunities, not career risks, where asking for help is normal not a sign of weakness, and where growth is expected and supported - not left to chance.

It creates loyalty. People stay in organisations where they feel they're developing, where they're trusted, and where their contribution is valued beyond their output.

And… yes… all of this leads to better business outcomes! Stronger delivery, better judgment, and more resilient teams.

The goal is to create a culture where people want to stay, grow, and contribute meaningfully. Everything else follows.

When you mentor effectively, you're not optimising for productivity, you're building a team of people who care about the work, trust each other, and want to be there. Sustainable success.

The Leadership Question

Mentoring shouldn’t be deferred work that you do when everything else is sorted.

It's foundational work that pays dividends at every level, in every moment of pressure. The teams that navigate complexity well aren't the ones with the most technically skilled individuals - they're the ones where capability has been deliberately built, judgment has been cultivated, and confidence has been earned through guided experience.

The real question is this: what kind of team are you building - one that depends on you, or one that's capable of more than either of you could achieve alone?

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Enable Great Conversations

The best decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen in conversation - with trusted peers, experienced advisors, and teams who know what it’s really like.

That's what Enable Great Conversations is about: a series exploring the real moments – the ambiguous ones, the uncomfortable ones, the ones that don’t fit neatly in a playbook - where leadership is tested, and clarity is found. Each release aims to capture a single insight, decision, or challenge that helps move organisations from noise to clarity.

There are many more of these moments worth unpacking and we’ll continue to explore them in the weeks and months ahead. We hope you’ll follow along, or join the conversation in the comments below, or follow along via the Enable Great page.