How leadership mentoring helps mentees become a leader by building identity, not just skills. Learn the signs, mentoring moves, and program design choices that improve promotion readiness.

Here's a question worth sitting with. If your mentee ticks every competency on the framework, gets glowing feedback from their peers, and still refers to themselves as "just" a project lead, what exactly has your program produced?

That's the uncomfortable middle ground where most leadership mentoring ends up in. You've built the capability but you haven't built the person who claims it. And until you do, the promotions, the succession pipeline, the whole business case for the program starts looking a lot thinner than the executive summary promised.

TL;DR

Leadership mentoring works best when it develops more than competence. A mentee can master frameworks, perform well, and still hesitate when a bigger role appears if they do not yet see themselves as a leader. This article argues that the missing link in many mentoring programs is not more skills training, but the intentional development of leader identity.

For leadership mentoring to produce stronger promotion readiness and succession outcomes, mentors need to help mentees claim leadership before the title arrives. That means recognising identity signals, naming leadership moments, coaching self-description, protecting confidence after setbacks, and measuring identity shift alongside capability growth.

Table of Contents

• What Skills Training Keep Missing
• 5 Signals Your Mentee Hasn't Made the Shift
• A Real Example Worth Studying: ACA's Mentoring Pilot
• Skills Mentoring vs Identity Mentoring
• 4 Moves that Shift Identity in a Mentoring Conversation
  
  • 1. Name the leadership moment before your mentee does.
  • 2. Assign a "provisional self" task between sessions.
  • 3. Coach the language of self-description.
  • 4. Protect the identity when the tactics fail.
• What to Build Into Your Program for Leadership Mentoring
• Where Brancher Steps In
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Skills Training Keep Missing

This has pretty much become a pattern– Emerging leaders finish the program, ace the 360, name every framework you throw at them, then freeze when a stretch role opens. The Center for Creative Leadership argues that leadership development often begins with identity and confidence, and that stepping into leadership requires a fundamental shift of identity alongside new skills.

Here's a useful way to think about it: Your mentee has an internal committee that votes on every action. Skills training adds capability to that committee. Identity work changes who's chairing it. Until the "I am a leader" voice runs the meeting, everything else is a talented deputy waiting for permission.

That's the layer your structured mentoring architecture sets up but doesn't finish. Structure gets the conversation booked. Identity is what happens once you're in the room.

The research is unusually blunt on this. In a widely cited study of a formal mentoring program, Muir found that participants saw formal mentoring as pivotal to discovering and developing their leader identity, with critical reflection also playing a key role.

It was whether participants started claiming the identity of "leader" in the first place, and that claim was the strongest predictor of whether they went on to actually lead.

5 Signals Your Mentee Hasn't Made the Shift

Before you can mentor identity, you have to hear it. Listen for:

• Permission language: "Would it be okay if I…" instead of "I've decided we should…"
• Credit deflection: Every win goes to the team, every miss lands on them.
• Title dependence: They think leadership arrives with the title, not the other way around.
• Rehearsed smallness: They downplay their scope in the first two minutes of every new meeting.
• Comparative framing: Their reference point is always someone else's identity.

None of these are skill problems. Every one is an identity problem, and they need a completely different kind of conversation.

A Real Example Worth Studying: ACA's Mentoring Pilot

The Australasian Corrosion Association (ACA) ran a four-month mentoring pilot that paired early-career professionals with senior experts through values-based matching and structured learning.

The numbers landed where every HR practitioner wants them to land: 100% match satisfaction, 100% would recommend the program, and 42% of mentees expecting a promotion off the back of it, alongside a reported lift in mentee confidence.

Look at what those numbers are actually telling you: A 42% promotion-expectancy rate in four months isn't a skills story. Four months is nowhere near long enough to retool a technical skill set to promotion standard.

What shifted was how those mentees saw themselves in relation to the next role, and whether they were willing to put their hand up for it. That's identity work, and it's what a well-structured mentoring pairing quietly produces when the design gets out of its own way.

The design choice is the one worth stealing. ACA sequenced the pairing so junior members were invited to see themselves as future senior experts in a relationship with an actual senior expert, before they had to defend that identity in a promotion panel.

Adoption of leadership behaviour followed the identity claim, not the other way around. Most programs run this backwards. They teach the skills, hope the identity turns up, and wonder why the pipeline stalls at senior manager.

Skills Mentoring vs Identity Mentoring

Brief your mentor cohort on this contrast and watch their conversations change:

Look at that last row. If you're only tracking sessions and self-rated skills, you have no way of knowing whether identity is actually moving. You're flying blind on the outcome that matters most.

4 Moves that Shift Identity in a Mentoring Conversation

You don't need psychologists. You need mentors who can do these four things well.

1. Name the leadership moment before your mentee does.

When they describe a situation where they led, they'll narrate it as what happened. Interrupt that. Say it out loud: "That's a leadership moment." It sounds small. It isn't.

Mentees may integrate aspects of a mentor’s identity into their self-concept, and empathic mentors can support mentees’ identity exploration.

2. Assign a "provisional self" task between sessions.

Herminia Ibarra’s foundational work on provisional selves argues that people adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional identities in practice before fully internalising them. Turn that into homework. Chair the meeting they usually take notes in. Send the strategy email under their own name. Give the feedback they'd normally ask their manager to give. The task isn't the point. The rehearsal is.

3. Coach the language of self-description.

Listen to how your mentee introduces themselves in a new room. If it starts with a job title and ends with a caveat, you've got work to do. A mentor's job is to rebuild that sentence with them until it lands as a claim, not an apology. HR practitioners will tell you this is what moves the needle fastest on internal promotion decisions, because panels hear the self-description before they read the CV.

4. Protect the identity when the tactics fail.

Every mentee you back will bomb something in the next twelve months. When they do, their identity is at risk, not their skills. A mentor who piles tactical feedback onto a fresh failure sends the mentee out thinking "I'm not cut out for this." A mentor who anchors the identity first ("Leaders take shots like this. Let's look at what to adjust.") sends them out thinking "I'm a leader who missed one." Same event. Two completely different trajectories.

What to Build Into Your Program for Leadership Mentoring

Briefing mentors on identity work and hoping isn't a strategy. If you want the shift across a whole cohort, the architecture has to make it almost inevitable.

• Identity-specific mentor training: Not another feedback module. A dedicated session on hearing identity language, mirroring it, and challenging it.
• A self-description artefact: Ask every mentee to write and revise a two-sentence leadership self-description at months one, six, and twelve. Track how it changes. That's your leading indicator.
• Peer cohorts, not just pairs: Peer holding environments accelerate identity claims. Pairs are necessary. Cohorts multiply the effect.
• Sponsor loops: Identity claimed in private is fragile. Identity claimed in front of a sponsor who repeats it upstream is durable. Build the sponsor introduction into month nine.

KPIs that catch identity, not activity. Move your reporting from "sessions completed" to "self-description shift, stretch role uptake, internal promotion rate within eighteen months."

That's the data your executive sponsor actually cares about.

Where Brancher Steps In

Every mentee in your organisation is running two development curves at once. One is the visible skills curve your program was designed around. The other is the invisible identity curve that quietly decides whether any of those skills get used at leadership scale.

Ignore the second curve and you'll keep producing capable people who never quite claim the room. Design for it, mentor for it, measure for it, and you'll produce leaders who walk in already believing they belong there.

That's the shift. It's what your organisation is actually paying you to engineer.

If you're ready to build identity work into the architecture of your mentoring program rather than leaving it to chance, Brancher is built for exactly this kind of structured, measurable, identity-forward mentoring at scale. Book a demo and let's design a program your future leaders will actually claim.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is leadership mentoring?

Leadership mentoring is a structured relationship that helps emerging leaders grow into bigger roles. In this article, its value goes beyond skill-building and focuses on helping mentees develop and claim a leadership identity.

Why does leadership mentoring sometimes fail to create confident leaders?

Leadership mentoring falls short when it develops capability without changing self-perception. If a mentee still does not see themselves as a leader, they may hesitate to pursue stretch roles, promotions, or visible leadership opportunities.

What are the signs a mentee has not yet developed a leadership identity?

Common signs include permission language, credit deflection, title dependence, rehearsed smallness, and constant comparison to others. These signals point to an identity gap rather than a skills gap.

How can mentors help mentees become leaders?

Mentors can help by naming leadership moments, assigning “provisional self” stretch tasks, coaching how mentees describe themselves, and protecting their identity when setbacks happen. The goal is to help mentees act like leaders before the title formally arrives.

How should leadership mentoring programs measure success?

Leadership mentoring programs should measure more than session volume or self-reported learning. Better indicators include self-description shift, stretch role uptake, promotion readiness, and internal promotion rates over time.