The Human Edge

🎉 It’s here! 𝗥𝗘𝗠𝗣 𝗢𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲. Our self-paced course is designed to help organisations create mentoring programmes that actually work.

Subscribe to our Newsletter here: buff.ly/ACC2wNd

Standardisation reduces management cost and enables comparison across programmes. But applied too broadly, it strips out the elements that make mentoring work in a particular place, with a particular group, at a particular moment. The structure travels. The relevance doesn't.

Most mentoring programmes are built on one of two assumptions. The first: give people a good system and results will follow. The second: find people with the right capabilities and they'll figure it out. Neither is wrong. But neither is enough.

⚠️ If no feedback loop is designed in from the start ↳ problems surface too late to fix and the final report explains what could not be recovered The programme did not fail at the end. It failed at the beginning.

⚠️ If success metrics are not built into the design ↳ you reach the evaluation and find you measured activity, not outcomes or impact ⚠️ If the design doesn't account for context ↳ it lands poorly and facilitation becomes damage control

When mentoring budgets tighten, design is usually first to go. Everyone agrees it is a reasonable trade-off. The delivery budget stays intact. The timeline holds. And then, about six weeks in, the real costs begin.

Properly resourcing a programme goes beyond spreadsheets. Mentoring with adequate capacity investment yields a 3x to 8.5x return in three years. But it's not just about money. Well-resourced teams can prevent issues, support mentors and document success.

If you're a funder or a programme manager who want to run mentoring programmes that actually produce a return, this is for you. 👉 buff.ly/Kn7l59h

capacity investment argument: building capability before delivery begins, structured support throughout and a clear connection between what participants learn and what it enables them to do differently.

REMP Online is a training and development programme for mentoring programme managers, the people whose decisions determine whether a mentoring programme produces a real return on the investment. The design choices in REMP reflect exactly the principles behind the

induction session and support during delivery so that relationships get the attention they need. Without that investment, you don't get a lower return. You get reactive management, mentor attrition and a report that proves the programme ran.

That's not a claim about a particular programme type or population. It's what happens when the investment includes the things that make mentoring actually work: time spent on design before the programme launches, mentor and mentee selection, preparation that goes beyond an

𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 3 𝐚𝐧𝐝 8.5 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬. That's not a claim about a particular programme type or population.

He asked the right questions and she worked it out herself. 2 years later, the business is profitable. That outcome didn't appear in the report. There was no box for it. Which raises the question: if your evaluation framework can't capture what actually changed, what is it for?

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 An entrepreneur comes into a programme convinced she needs to raise investment. She leaves having realised she needs a different business model entirely. Her mentor didn't give her the answer.

Not the wrong participants. Design that was rushed, trimmed or cut to bring the headline cost down. The most expensive mistakes are the ones caught late. A design flaw identified before launch costs a fraction of one found six months into delivery.

A programme that skips proper design doesn't fail at the end; it fails at the beginning and then spends the rest of its budget trying to compensate. Underinvesting in design is the single most common reason mentoring programmes underperform. Not bad mentors.

𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐠𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 Most mentoring budgets are built around delivery: staff time, sessions, events, communications. The things you can point to and say, that's where the money went.