Embedding a Culture of Mentoring and Trust: A Strategic Imperative for Modern Organisations

Author

Sallina Jeffrey MBA PhD Candidate

Organisational Psychology

In an era defined by rapid transformation, hybrid work, and shifting employee expectations, organisational performance depends not just on systems or strategy but on culture. Specifically, cultures that foster high trust and mentoring are the most adaptive, engaged, and high-performing.

This perspective outlines how trust and mentoring intersect as foundational capabilities and how organisations can embed both into their operating models in meaningful, research-informed ways.

🔍 Why Mentoring and Trust Matter Now More Than Ever

Recent studies show mentoring is no longer a “programmatic” function relegated to high-potentials or early-career onboarding. Instead, it's emerging as a core cultural asset that directly supports employee engagement, retention, and cross-functional capability building.

At the same time, trust has moved from a soft construct to a measurable business driver. In high-trust environments, employees are 76% more engaged, 50% more productive, and 40% less likely to burn out (Zak, 2017). When mentoring is built upon trust, not compliance, it becomes a catalyst for capability growth and collaboration at scale.

📘 What the Research Tells Us

A review of recent peer-reviewed research highlights several themes relevant to corporate environments:

1. Mentoring must be embedded into organisational culture, not isolated as an initiative

According to Farnese, Benevene & Barbieri (2022) in the Journal of Trust Research, organisations that treat mentoring as a cultural norm integrated into day-to-day interactions foster stronger internal networks, faster capability development, and increased organisational learning. These cultures make mentoring everyone’s responsibility, not just HR’s.

2. Reciprocal trust enables mentoring to be multidirectional

Trust and mentoring are mutually reinforcing. In high-trust organisations, employees are more willing to share knowledge, ask for guidance, and offer feedback — the foundations of effective mentoring. Burke et al. (2007) describe this as “psychological safety” — a state that enables employees at all levels to mentor and be mentored, irrespective of hierarchy.

3. Leadership behaviour sets the tone for cultural adoption

In their book Humble Leadership, Schein & Schein (2018) argue that leadership must shift from control to relational openness. Mentoring thrives when leaders model vulnerability, curiosity, transparency and active learning. This sets the tone for the broader organisation and helps dismantle power barriers that often inhibit knowledge-sharing.

4. Peer and cross-functional mentoring drive innovation and agility

In agile and hybrid environments, mentoring increasingly happens horizontally between peers, across disciplines, and even across geographies. Tyagi et al. (2022), writing in Information and Software Technology, show that distributed teams with high trust engage more readily in peer coaching, which in turn accelerates knowledge flow and project velocity.

5. Recognition and reinforcement drive sustained behaviour

Mentoring behaviour is more likely to be sustained when recognised, measured, and integrated into performance development frameworks. Pittman (2020) suggests that organisations should treat relational capabilities — like mentoring, coaching, and trust-building as strategic competencies, not soft skills.

🛠️ Embedding a Mentoring and Trust Culture: Organisational Levers

To operationalise these insights, organisations should focus on five key areas:

1. Leadership Alignment

Ensure leaders at every level understand their role as cultural stewards, not just performance managers. Equip them with human-centred leadership skills and coach-like behaviours.

2. Structural Integration

Integrate mentoring into performance development, project design, team rituals, and onboarding processes. Move beyond static program design to dynamic cultural practices.

3. Capability Building

Build internal mentoring capability through training, mentoring toolkits, and shared frameworks that normalise diverse forms of mentoring (e.g., peer, reverse, group-based).

4. Measurement and Feedback

Track engagement with mentoring initiatives and their impact on retention, leadership pipeline strength, and team trust scores. Use qualitative stories alongside quantitative data.

5. Cultural Reinforcement

Celebrate mentoring behaviours in formal and informal ways, including recognition platforms, storytelling, and leadership communications.

🎯 Final Insight: Mentoring and Trust Are Everyone’s Business

Trust is not a leadership style. It’s a strategic condition that enables mentoring to become a shared language across the organisation. When people trust one another, mentoring relationships grow organically. When mentoring is normalised, trust deepens in turn.

Creating this culture is not just a task for HR or People and Culture. It requires distributed ownership, visible leadership alignment, and a commitment to modelling the behaviours we want to see, listening, guiding, learning, and lifting each other up. And here’s the truth: mentoring is often overlooked or considered a 'nice to have'. Yet what’s frequently missed is its direct impact on the bottom line, from improving retention and engagement to accelerating learning and leadership capability.

The hardest part isn’t believing in the value; it’s knowing where to start and how to track the outcomes. That’s where mentoring platforms and software come into their own. They are cost-effective, simple to implement, and offer clear visibility into how mentoring is evolving across your organisation.

If mentoring and trust are treated as strategic levers, not just cultural buzzwords, the results speak for themselves.

Start small. Start intentionally. But most importantly — start.

Here's to building high-trust teams where everyone has each other's backs!

Author Sallina Jeffrey MBA

PhD Candidate

📚 References

Farnese, M.L., Benevene, P., & Barbieri, B. (2022). Learning to trust in social enterprises: The contribution of organisational culture to trust dynamics. Journal of Trust Research.🔗 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21515581.2022.2125399
Burke, C.S., Sims, D.E., Lazzara, E.H., & Salas, E. (2007). Trust in leadership: A multi-level review and integration. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(6), 606–632.🔗 https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=5810c556791666c5aca28ef48dd7b9eacb19784c
Schein, E.H., & Schein, P.A. (2018). Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust. Wiley.🔗 https://jcldusafa.org/index.php/jcld/article/download/151/146
Tyagi, S., Sibal, R., & Suri, B. (2022). Empirically developed framework for building trust in distributed agile teams. Information and Software Technology, 146, 106852.🔗 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584922000064
Pittman, A. (2020). Leadership rebooted: Cultivating trust with the brain in mind. Human Service Organisations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 44(1), 74–86.🔗 https://www.academia.edu/download/63681176/Leadership_Rebooted_Cultivating_Trust_with_the_Brain_in_Mind_Published20200619-61113-ezxxm1.pdf
Zak, P.J. (2017). Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies. AMACOM.🔗 https://books.google.com/books?id=Uf7nDAAAQBAJ