Mentoring is usually treated as an activity.
For some leaders, it is not an activity at all. It is simply part of how they lead.
They are not preparing questions for a one-to-one or mentally tracking who needs a structured conversation. They are simply moving through their work. Yet there is something in how they pay attention to what is being said, or not said, that makes development almost incidental to ordinary interaction.
These are not leaders who run mentoring programmes. They are leaders for whom development is par of the job.
The more familiar picture of mentoring is formal.
It appears in calendars. It has a name, sometimes an agenda, a recurring slot in the diary. At its best, formalised mentoring is genuinely valuable - it creates accountability, broadens access to experience, and places development explicitly on the agenda. These are not small things.
But most meaningful mentoring rarely happens like this.
The conversations that have actually shaped how people work (the ones still carried years later) tend not to have started with a formal agenda. They began after something went wrong, or during a walk that turned into a longer conversation.
Development often happens in moments, not sessions.
The 4pm message: "Can I run something past you?"
The debrief after a presentation that did not land.
The casual exchange when someone finally says what they have been carrying.
The tone in which uncertainty is met - with patience or with pressure, with curiosity or with evaluative distance.
The ten minutes in a corridor that neither party would ever have scheduled, but that one of them will remember for years.
There's a distinction between mentoring as an activity and mentoring as an orientation.
The activity version is bounded and explicit: an agenda, a timeframe, an arrangement. It has a legitimate and important role in any serious approach to development. But it describes only a portion of what actually happens when people grow in a professional context.
The orientation version is more subtle. It means moving through working relationships with a persistent attentiveness: noticing when someone is in genuinely unfamiliar territory, listening for the question beneath the stated one, recognising when honest perspective is needed more than encouragement. It is responsive rather than scheduled.
Some leaders do not confine this to a scheduled conversation. It is simply part of how they lead.
This is not an argument for constant feedback, or for carrying a covert developmental agenda into every informal exchange. Nor is it a suggestion that relationships should be instrumentalised in service of someone else's growth. That misses the point and, in practice, would corrode the conditions it depends on.
The argument is towards something more particular. Listening for patterns across conversations over time, rather than responding to individual moments in isolation. Noticing when someone is ready for a stretch, rather than waiting for a formal review cycle to confirm it. Offering perspective when the relational context can hold it, rather than when it is most convenient to deliver. Being genuinely available without being permanently on.
At senior levels, this has a significance that deserves more attention.
The higher someone advances within an organisation, the rarer honest input becomes. Conversations grow more managed. The space to hold a difficult question with genuine uncertainty shrinks. Safe thinking space is a scarce resource at precisely the point in a career when its absence matters most.
A leader who is genuinely available in unscheduled moments offers something a formal programme cannot replace: a quiet but consistent signal that development has not been fully displaced by the demands of performance.
At senior levels, that signal is more significant than it may appear.
When mentoring is limited to formal sessions, development narrows.
- Feedback becomes scheduled rather than responsive.
- Performance processes carry more weight.
- People wait for permission to say what they already know.
Nothing collapses overnight; the change is incremental.
Leadership is not only about direction and delivery.
It is also about the people around you - where they are in their development, what they are carrying, and what they might become with the right conditions. Much of this work is unseen. It does not appear in formal frameworks or annual reviews. It is not always named at the time, even by the person it matters the most to.
It happens in the margins; in time created without an agenda.
Ady Coles works as a thinking partner and mentor to leaders and teams navigating complexity. His work centres on judgement, perspective, and the often-invisible work of translation - helping people understand their role in the system, make better decisions, and operate with confidence in uncertain environments.