Pairing a mentor and mentee and hoping for the best is the most common way mentorship programs fail. Without a light structure — a suggested cadence, a few starter topics, a way to flag if the match is not working — most pairs drift after the first meeting.

Programs that stick tend to share three traits: a defined but flexible meeting cadence, a short list of conversation starters for the first few sessions so neither person has to invent an agenda from scratch, and a simple check-in at the one-month mark to catch a mismatched pair early rather than letting it quietly fade.

The best mentors are not always the most senior person available — someone two or three steps ahead of the mentee often remembers the exact struggles involved far more vividly than someone a decade removed from them.