Should Mentoring Be Mandatory or Voluntary?

In this video, Holly makes the case for why mentoring should be voluntary rather than mandatory, arguing that forced participation quietly kills engagement. She walks through a real example: a client running a program for high-potential employees who were already juggling ten other assigned activities, workshops, an existing coach, and a previously assigned mentor.

The result, unsurprisingly, was the least engaged group across any program Brancher has run, because participants felt tapped on the shoulder rather than genuinely invested.

Holly's fix isn't to abandon structure altogether. She recommends keeping an expression-of-interest form so organizations can still vet and select participants, while making sure the final step is always an opt-in. Her broader point lands on a simple trade-off: control over who enters a program matters less than whether they actually want to be there, since real engagement only shows up when people choose the relationship for themselves.

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