Situational Mentoring: What It Is and Why It Works in the Workplace

Last Updated: 27 August 2026

Quick answer: Situational mentoring means adapting your mentoring style (not your mentor) to fit what the mentee needs in a given moment. It's built on Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership framework, first developed in 1969, which holds that no single mentoring style works for every situation. A mentor moves between four styles: directive, coaching, supporting and challenging; depending on the mentee's confidence and competence at that point in time.

TL;DR

• Situational mentoring adapts how a mentor supports a mentee, not who the mentor is. It's a style-switching framework, not a type of mentor.
• It's built on Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory (1969), which identifies four mentoring styles: directive, coaching, supporting and challenging.
• Gallup research shows employees with mentors are twice as likely to say they've had real opportunities to learn and grow at work, and twice as likely to be engaged.
• You'll also see "situational mentoring" used to describe something different, a short-term subject matter expert brought in for one issue. Both usages exist; this guide covers the adaptive-style framework and flags the distinction.
• Mentoring software with built-in matching and check-in tools makes it far easier for mentors to apply this in practice, especially across a large program.

Table of Contents

• What Is Situational Mentoring?
• The 4 Situational Mentoring Styles
• Situational Mentoring vs a Situational Mentor
• Why Situational Mentoring Works in the Workplace
• Real Example: Aligning Mentoring to Development Streams
• How to Implement Situational Mentoring in Your Organisation
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Situational Mentoring?

Situational mentoring is a mentoring approach based on Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory, first outlined in 1969 and later refined through the 1970s. The theory rests on two ideas: first, that effective leaders and mentors adjust their style to the situation in front of them, and second, that there's no single "best" style of mentoring that works in every case.

In practice, this means a mentor doesn't mentor the same way every session. They read the mentee's current competence and confidence on a specific task or goal, then choose the style that fits — sometimes giving direct instruction, sometimes asking questions and stepping back, sometimes just backing the mentee's confidence, and sometimes pushing them to stretch further.

This is what makes situational mentoring different from a fixed mentoring style: it's not about finding a mentor who's naturally "a coach" or "a directive type." It's about one mentor flexing across styles as the mentee's needs shift over the life of the relationship.

The 4 Situational Mentoring Styles

A mentor might use all four styles with the same mentee over a few months: directive when the mentee starts a brand-new task, coaching once they've got the basics, support when they hit a setback, and challenge once they're ready to grow past their current level.

Situational Mentoring vs a Situational Mentor: Two Different Things

Worth flagging, because it trips people up: "situational mentoring" gets used two different ways online, and they're not the same concept.

The framework this article covers (adapting mentoring style within an ongoing relationship) is the Hersey and Blanchard model. But you'll also see the term used to describe bringing in a situational mentor: a subject matter expert who supports a mentee for a short, defined period around one specific challenge (preparing for a board presentation, learning a new tool, navigating a restructure), separate from (and often alongside) an existing formal mentor.

Both are legitimate uses of the term, and they're not mutually exclusive. A mentoring program can run situational mentoring (style adaptation) as its core approach, while also encouraging mentees to draw in situational mentors (short-term experts) for specific gaps.

If you're researching this topic elsewhere and the definition doesn't quite match what you read here, this is usually why.

Why Situational Mentoring Works in the Workplace

1. It Meets the Mentee Where They Are

Rather than applying the same style regardless of context, situational mentoring adjusts to what the mentee actually needs at that point; which means the guidance is more likely to be relevant, and more likely to get used.

2. It Strengthens Engagement and Retention

Gallup's research on mentors and sponsors found that employees with mentors are twice as likely to strongly agree they've had real opportunities to learn and grow at work in the past year, twice as likely to be engaged, and 98% more likely to say they'd recommend their organisation as a great place to work.

The stakes are real: Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated US$10 trillion in lost productivity.

Mentoring that's genuinely responsive to what an employee needs (rather than generic) is one of the more direct levers a program has against that trend.

3. It Helps Close Skills Gaps Faster

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of employers now identify skills gaps as the single biggest barrier to business transformation over 2025–2030, ahead of capital, regulation or culture.

Situational mentoring is well suited to this problem because it's built around responding to a specific, current gap rather than delivering the same generic development plan to everyone; which matters more as the skills employers need keep shifting.

4. It Encourages Continuous Learning

LinkedIn Learning's 2018 Workplace Learning Report found that 94% of employees said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. A mentoring style that flexes with the mentee (rather than a rigid, one-size-fits-all format) signals that investment more clearly than a static program does.

5. It Supports Diversity of Thought

Because situational mentoring often means mentees draw on different mentors (or different styles from the same mentor) for different challenges, it naturally exposes them to a broader range of perspectives.

McKinsey's 2023 Diversity Matters Even More report found companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity on their executive teams were 39% more likely to financially outperform those in the bottom quartile — matching the same 39% figure for gender diversity on executive teams.

Mentoring programs that deliberately widen the range of people a mentee learns from (including through reverse mentoring) support that same principle at an individual level.

Real Example: Aligning Mentoring to Development Streams

South Australia's Department of Infrastructure and Transport (DIT) had a workforce of more than 2,200 employees and plenty of informal mentoring happening organically, but no formal structure behind it.

Working with Brancher, DIT ran two six-month mentoring programs aligned to four distinct workforce capability streams, rather than a single generic program applied uniformly across the department.

That's situational mentoring applied at a program level: matching the mentoring approach to the specific development need, rather than running one format for everyone regardless of what they actually needed.

How to Implement Situational Mentoring in Your Organisation

1. Train mentors on all four styles, not just their default. Most mentors naturally lean toward one style (often directive or supportive). Give them the language and confidence to recognise when a different style is called for. Our guide on how to be a great mentor covers the practical side of adapting your approach mid-relationship.
2. Build in regular goal check-ins. A mentee's competence and confidence on a given goal shifts over weeks, not months — so the mentor needs current information to pick the right style, not an assumption formed in week one.
3. Widen the pool of who mentees can learn from. Encourage peer mentoring alongside a primary formal match, so mentees have somewhere to go for situational, subject-specific input without needing to end an existing mentoring relationship to get it.
4. Recognise and reward mentors who flex their style well. This reinforces that adapting to the mentee (not sticking to a comfortable default) is what's valued.
5. Use mentoring software to keep it structured. Manually tracking where each mentee is up to, across dozens or hundreds of pairs, doesn't scale. Brancher's mentoring software is built to launch, monitor and report on mentoring relationships so administrators can see where a mentee's needs are shifting, and Brancher also runs mentor training that builds this kind of adaptive approach in from day one; reinforcing that anyone can be a mentor, regardless of experience level, provided they know how to read the situation.

If you're weighing up formal versus informal structures more broadly before deciding how to build this in, our piece on formal vs informal mentoring is a useful companion read. Situational mentoring works in either structure, but it's easier to train and track consistently in a formal one.

You can also give us a call to learn more about how mentoring fits into your organisation’s needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is situational mentoring?

Situational mentoring is a mentoring approach where the mentor adapts their style (directive, coaching, supporting or challenging) to match what the mentee needs at that specific point in time, based on Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory. It is not about switching mentors, but about one mentor adjusting how they mentor as circumstances change.

What is situational mentorship, and how is it different from regular mentoring?

Situational mentorship is the same concept as situational mentoring: an adaptive framework rather than a fixed style. Regular or "one style fits all" mentoring tends to apply the same approach (often coaching, or often directive) throughout the entire relationship regardless of what the mentee is facing. Situational mentorship treats style as a variable that should change with the mentee's competence and confidence on the task at hand.

What are the 4 situational mentoring styles?

The four styles are directive (telling), coaching (questioning), supporting (encouraging) and challenging (feedback). Each is suited to a different combination of the mentee's competence and confidence — see the table above for when to use each one.

What are the best platforms offering situational mentoring programs?

Rather than naming specific platforms, it's more useful to know what to look for, since "best" depends on your program's size and goals. Look for mentoring software that supports flexible, ongoing check-ins (so mentors have current information to choose the right style), personality and values-based matching (so mentors and mentees are well-suited from the start), mentor training that explicitly covers adapting style rather than assuming one approach fits all relationships, and reporting that shows administrators where a mentee's needs are shifting over time.

Brancher's mentoring software is built around this kind of ongoing, needs-responsive matching and monitoring, with mentor training that covers situational style adaptation directly — worth a look if you're evaluating options, alongside whatever else is on your shortlist.

How can situational mentoring improve employee performance in tech companies?

Tech teams tend to face frequent, specific skill demands (a new framework, a new compliance requirement, a sudden leadership gap) more often than a slow, generalised career development need.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found 63% of employers already rank skills gaps as their single biggest barrier to business transformation, and technology and AI-related skills are among the fastest-growing in demand.

Situational mentoring is well suited to this pace because it's designed to respond to the specific gap in front of the mentee rather than working through a fixed curriculum. In practice, that often means directive support when a developer needs to get up to speed on an unfamiliar tool quickly, coaching once they've got the fundamentals, and short-term situational mentors (subject matter experts) brought in around specific technical challenges as they arise.

Gallup's broader research on mentoring also holds in tech contexts: employees with mentors are twice as likely to be engaged at work, which matters in an industry with historically high turnover.

How long does a situational mentoring relationship typically last?

There's no fixed length, because the framework is about adapting style within a relationship rather than defining its duration. A situational mentoring relationship can run for the life of a standard formal mentoring program (commonly six to twelve months), with the mentor's style shifting throughout. Where "situational mentoring" refers instead to a short-term subject matter expert (see the section above), that relationship is typically much shorter and ends once the specific goal is met.

Author Bio

Holly Brailsford is Co-Founder and CEO of Brancher, and a registered organisational psychologist specialising in workplace mentoring design.

Sources

1. Gallup. (2025). Mentors and Sponsors Make the Difference. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/473999/mentors-sponsors-difference.aspx
2. Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
3. World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/digest/
4. LinkedIn Learning. (2018). Workplace Learning Report 2018.
5. McKinsey & Company. (2023). Diversity Matters Even More: The Case for Holistic Impact. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact
6. Brancher. (2025). How DIT Turned Informal Mentoring into a Strategic Workforce Asset. https://brancher.com.au/blog/case-study-3