--- title: "Why Internal Mentorship Programs Fall Flat | Your Craft Your Climb" description: "Right people, right seats — until it comes to mentorship. Why internal mentorship programs at AEC firms often fall flat, and what to do instead." lang: en json-ld: | { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Right People, Right Seats... Until It Comes to Mentorship?", "description": "Why internal mentorship programs at AEC firms often fall flat — and what leadership development actually requires.", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Zack Tomlin", "url": "https://yourcraftyourclimb.com" }, "datePublished": "2026-07-09", "mainEntityOfPage": { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://yourcraftyourclimb.com/articles/why-internal-mentorship-programs-fall-flat" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Your Craft Your Climb", "url": "https://yourcraftyourclimb.com" } } --- [![Your Craft Your Climb - Business and Leadership Growth](/__l5e/assets-v1/25aac360-096f-4a69-bf6f-fb90cf595961/logo-horizontal.png)](/) [All Articles](/articles) High-Agency Leadership # Right People, Right Seats... Until It Comes to Mentorship? Why internal mentorship programs often fall flat Zack Tomlin, PE · July 9, 2026 “Right people, right seats.” If you’ve spent any time leading an AEC or professional services firm, you’ve heard it a hundred times. You’ve probably said it yourself. And you probably believe it — because it’s true. Getting the right person in the right role changes everything. We know this. We obsess over it when we’re assembling project teams, hiring new staff, and evaluating who should be client-facing versus heads-down in production. Then we turn around and assign our most important developmental relationship — the mentoring of a future leader — to whoever happens to be senior and available. No vetting for fit. No consideration of motivation. No real thought about whether this person has the skills, the bandwidth, or even the desire to develop someone else. We just tap them on the shoulder and say, “Take Sarah under your wing.” And then we’re surprised when the results are inconsistent. ## This Isn’t a Shot at Mentors Most are good, well-meaning people — often your best performers — who genuinely care about the person sitting across from them. They want to see them grow. But caring about someone’s growth and being equipped and energized by the work of developing them are two very different things. We conflate them constantly. Think about what we’re really asking of an internal mentor. We need someone who is technically excellent in their field. Someone who doesn’t just know what they do, but why they do it — and can articulate that in a way that’s transferable. Someone who is motivated by teaching, not just tolerant of it. Someone whose communication style can meet different learners where they are. And someone who has the time and bandwidth to do all of this on top of the work that made them a good candidate in the first place. That person is a unicorn. Most mentors have one or two of those qualities. Maybe three on a good day. We pretend they have all six and then wonder why the mentee is still figuring things out on their own eighteen months later. ## Imitation Isn’t Development Here’s where it gets worse. Even when the stars align and you find a strong mentor, the most common model still keeps people at the lowest level of development: imitation. “Watch how I do it. Now do it that way.” That works for technical processes. There’s a right way to detail a connection or coordinate a set of drawings, and learning by watching is perfectly fine for those tasks. But leadership isn’t a technical process. The moment the situation changes — a different team, a different client, a different kind of conflict — the copied playbook breaks. The mentee has behaviors without principles, answers without understanding, and no foundation to build new solutions from. They’ve been taught what to do, but not how to think about the problem. And most internal mentors, however well-intentioned, aren’t in a position to offer anything more. Not because they lack intelligence, but because breaking down years of intuition into a transferable framework is an enormous ask — one that requires a skill set most of us were never trained in. ## The Part No One Talks About Many of these mentors don’t actually want the job. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a mismatch — the same kind of mismatch we’d catch in a heartbeat if it were any other role. Some people are deeply fulfilled by teaching and coaching. Others find it draining. The frustration isn’t laziness. It’s the feeling of being pulled away from work they’re good at and energized by, to do work they feel clumsy at and stretched thin by. Add a full plate of projects, deadlines, and client demands, and mentoring becomes the thing that slides — not because it doesn’t matter, but because the urgent drowns out the important. Every time. We would never put someone on a project team this way. We wouldn’t assign a lead engineer to a role they weren’t motivated by, weren’t skilled in, and didn’t have time for — and then blame them when the project underperformed. But that’s exactly what we do with mentorship. > Right people, right seats. Except this one. ## We Outsource Everything Else Here’s the thing that makes this problem harder to see: we outsource everything else we know we can’t do well internally. Accounting, legal, IT, marketing — when we recognize we don’t have the time, talent, or systems to deliver quality in-house, we find someone who does. No shame in it. It’s sound business thinking. But leadership development — arguably the highest-leverage investment a firm can make in its engagement, retention, and long-term performance — we insist on handling with spare parts and spare time. We treat it as something that should happen organically, as a byproduct of proximity to someone more experienced. And sometimes it does. But banking on “sometimes” isn’t a strategy. None of this means internal mentors have no role to play. They do. A good mentor who knows your firm, your clients, and your culture is invaluable for context that no outsider can provide. But context and development aren’t the same thing, and asking one person — usually an already-stretched one — to deliver both is how these programs fall flat. If you believe that developing leaders is one of the most important things your firm does, then it deserves the same rigor you bring to every other critical function. It deserves the right people in the right seats — but that person and that seat might be a resource outside your organization. * * * _I’m Zack Tomlin, founder of [Your Craft Your Climb](https://yourcraftyourclimb.com). After building an AEC firm from one person to twenty over twelve years, I shifted my focus to the thing that made the biggest difference — leadership. Today I help firms develop the senior and emerging leaders they depend on, through peer groups, workshops, and direct advisory built specifically for AEC firms._ _Learn more at [yourcraftyourclimb.com](https://yourcraftyourclimb.com) and grab a free copy of my award-winning book, [Craft: The Expedition of Business](https://yourcraftyourclimb.com/the-expedition-of-business)._ Further Reading [ More Articles Browse all writings. ](/articles)[ Home Work with Zack. ](/) Get In Touch ## Contact Us Have a question, want to know more, or just want to say hello? Submit the form below and we'll get back to you. 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