If Mentoring Matters, Prove It!

Back in 2024, I spoke with a friend who had recently left a position in the hospitality industry. I was surprised when he made the announcement because I thought he had genuinely liked the work he had been doing, so I thought perhaps his decision might be related to something like burnout or wanting more regular hours.

It turned out to be neither.

After taking a few years to establish himself in his role, he had asked his boss what he needed to do to move to the next level. The response he received was very positive, and he was told that the leadership team would sit down soon to map out a development plan. A few months passed with no concrete action, so he asked again. Once more, he was praised for his initiative and reassured that the conversation would happen after a particularly busy stretch. When that follow-up never materialized, he tried a third time, and then a fourth, and each time he received encouragement but no calendar invitation, no documented goals, and no defined next steps.

So when a competitor approached him with a higher-level job offer supported by a clear roadmap for advancement, he accepted the offer. What he left behind wasn’t a toxic environment or a company in distress, but rather a workplace where mentoring was spoken about warmly but never actually delivered.

As he later summarized it: “They were happy to use me, but they weren’t willing to grow me.”

That story was on my mind (a lot) as I sat in a breakout session at the recent CHART conference in New Orleans titled “Igniting Mentoring, Unlocking Potential,” led by Jay Hartwig, the Director of People and Retention at Fox Restaurant Concepts. Jay opened the session by inviting participants to introduce themselves and share something they were an “unexpected expert” in, which led to stories about macarons that finally stopped collapsing after repeated failures, beef jerky perfected through careful calibration of smoke and time, and houseplants thriving in a meticulously tended home garden. The exercise worked because it underscored a basic truth without overstating it: expertise is rarely handed to us fully formed. It is built through repetition, frustration, adjustment, and often through the influence of someone who shares their experience along the way. 

What I kept thinking about as Jay worked through the session was how familiar all of it sounded, and not in a reassuring way. The concepts were not obscure or complicated, and there was no shortage of nodding in the room because most of the people sitting there already believed in mentoring. The harder question, which Jay raised without quite saying it directly, was whether believing in mentoring and actually practicing it are as close together as we tend to assume.

The recommendations below are one attempt to close that gap. Drawn partly from Jay’s presentation and partly from the conversation that unfolded among the CHART members sitting around my table, they focus on making mentoring real and sustainable in our sometimes-chaotic workplaces. As often happens at these conferences, the formal session started the discussion, and the collective experience in the room pushed it further.

• Distinguish mentoring from everything else: There is a real temptation to label every type of interaction with a direct report as mentoring, and that’s something all hospitality professionals need to be careful about. You don’t get to pat yourself on the back just because you asked Betty or Trevor how they were doing last week. That’s NOT mentoring. In the same vein, correcting a performance issue, debriefing after a busy service, and reinforcing standards are all forms of coaching or managing, but they are also NOT mentoring. Meeting with a subordinate to discuss a task they are working on is NOT mentoring. Having lunch with a member of your team and discussing the week ahead is NOT mentoring. True mentoring is oriented toward the person’s career goals, their sense of what they are capable of, and where they are trying to go. They are conversations that focus solely and deliberately on helping someone move toward that future.

• Create an agreed-upon mentorship structure: Telling someone you believe in their potential can be meaningful, but belief without follow-through loses its power quickly, so leaders who are serious about developing their teams need to transform that encouragement into visible commitments. That usually begins with a kickoff conversation where expectations are clarified, the mentee describes what they hope to gain from the relationship, and a cadence is agreed upon that works for both sides. From there, a regular series of dedicated meetings will allow progress to be discussed and next steps to be defined, with agendas help keep those conversations focused, SMART goals clarify what development should look like, and shared notes ensure that progress doesn’t disappear between sessions.

• Protect the time: In hospitality, urgent operational demands can sometimes derail the plans we have made for our shifts, so organizations need to establish a set of non-negotiables that remain safeguarded even during periods of peak activity. This list of priorities will likely include financial reviews, management meetings, performance discussions, and yes, mentoring sessions should be on it as well. One way to put this principle into practice is the method Jay described from Fox Restaurant Concepts, where these sessions are placed on the broader team calendar so colleagues know not to interrupt, and the time is treated as a valued commitment. Other suggestions include scheduling mentoring conversations outside peak operating hours, meeting away from the operation to minimize distractions, or simply turning off phones so the discussions receive everyone’s full attention.

• Let them experience the work: Stories and advice have their place, but mentoring becomes far more powerful when people can observe and participate in the work themselves. If you want someone to learn how to negotiate with vendors, don’t just tell them about a successful deal you once made. Invite them to sit in on the next vendor meeting and watch how the conversation unfolds. If you want them to learn how to lead a difficult conversation, let them observe one and then talk through what happened afterward. Real exposure to those moments teaches far more than explanations ever could.

• Build challenges into the relationship: During the breakout, Jay asked us to write down the name of someone in our careers who had changed our lives, and then to describe what that person had done and what the impact had been. As people began sharing, the pattern was remarkably consistent. The answers were not the people who had removed obstacles, made life easier, or protected us from discomfort. The heroes of the stories were the ones who had pushed us out of our comfort zones, challenged us to take on conversations or responsibilities we did not yet feel ready for, and helped us see ourselves as more capable than we had assumed. As one attendee put it, they “made me believe in me,” and Jay’s point was that this is exactly what mentoring looks like. It is not about shielding people from difficulty, but about creating the right kind of stretch, where the challenge is real, the support is present, and the result is greater confidence, competence, and growth.

• Expand their world beyond your workplace: A mentor’s role is not limited to the four walls of the restaurant, hotel, or corporate office. One of the most valuable things you can do for someone developing their career is introduce them to people and environments that broaden their perspective. That might mean inviting them to attend an industry event (like a CHART conference or Regional Training Forum), introducing them to colleagues in other departments, or connecting them with professionals in the wider hospitality community. Those experiences help protégés see how the industry works beyond their immediate role and expose them to new ideas about where their career might go.

• Make it repeatable rather than personality-dependent: Organizations that rely on a handful of leaders who happen to be naturally generous with their time and attention will always struggle to scale development in any meaningful way, because what they have is not a system but a collection of individual relationships that exist because of who happens to be in the room. Fox’s “Journey to Success” program has been running for more than a decade and is built around a structured twelve-week curriculum with defined expectations, accountability forms submitted weekly by both the mentor and the mentee, and a graduation event that communicates clearly to participants that what they completed truly mattered. Participants move through a structured curriculum covering topics like guest experience leadership, communication and coaching, financial fundamentals, problem-solving, and professional presence, and the program culminates in a capstone review of their progress. The retention data behind the program is striking in that every participant who has stayed with the company has gone on to be promoted, which is not a coincidence but rather what tends to happen when development is treated as a system and a genuine organizational priority rather than an occasional act of individual goodwill.

When I think back to my friend’s decision to leave his old job, what stays with me is not the frustration he eventually felt but the patience he showed before reaching that point. He asked four times, across months, and what he was asking for was not special treatment or an accelerated timeline. He simply wanted a defined path and evidence that the people around him were willing to help him walk it. His organization did not fail him through hostility or bad intent, but by letting a gap grow between what was promised and what was delivered until it became too wide to bridge.

Mentoring does not necessarily require a formal program or elaborate infrastructure to begin. In many workplaces, people naturally gravitate toward mentors they trust, and some of the most influential mentoring relationships grow organically through shared work and conversation. What it does require, however, is a genuine commitment to someone else’s development.

And if you want to know whether that commitment exists within you, start with your own calendar. Look at it right now and count the number of actual mentoring sessions (as defined in the bullet points above) currently scheduled with your employees. Or count how many you have completed in the last year. Or the last two years. If the answer keeps coming up as “zero,” then mentoring is probably not happening nearly as often as you think – and somewhere on your team, someone may already be counting the days until they stop asking for it.