The Lost Art Of Mentoring In Corporate India

Mentoring is as old as human civilisation itself. Long before classrooms, handbooks or corporate titles, societies relied on elders, artisans, philosophers and storytellers to guide the next generation.

From the gurus of ancient India to the masters of Greek academies, from apprenticeships in medieval guilds to modern business schools, mentoring has always been the way wisdom travelled across time. It was the passing of judgment, craft, character and courage. In the world of management too, the most enduring leaders were often shaped not by training programmes, but by mentors who taught them how to think, not just what to do.

There is a crisis inside corporate India that almost no dashboard captures. It does not appear in HR scorecards or board packs. It cannot be solved with a new policy or a motivational offsite. I call it the mentoring recession. It is the slow erosion of guidance, presence and wisdom-sharing between generations. It weakens the emotional spine of organisations long before results show any cracks.

I do not say this lightly. I have spent many years mentoring leaders and young professionals who are leaders in their own right now, across industries. I have heard their confusion, their hunger for context, their desire for someone older to make sense of the path ahead. They do not lack ambition. They lack anchors. They want to understand, not only perform. They want to grow, not only deliver. They want someone who will help them see the long arc of a career that stretches beyond the next quarter.

Yet the modern workplace has become full of managers but short of mentors. Full of process but thin on wisdom. Full of results but shallow in reflection. The next generation walks into office buildings expecting guidance and often finds only busyness. They meet people with experience, but not necessarily with the time or inclination to share it.

The result is a quiet thinning of organisational depth, where culture begins to lose its richness and teams drift into transactional routines. Young professionals start to feel unanchored, unsure of how to grow or whom to learn from, and companies, often without realising it, begin to lose continuity. When mentoring weakens, the cracks first appear not in performance numbers but in the leadership pipeline itself, long before any dashboard reveals the damage.

That is why we must go deeper into the roots of this recession — into generational values, cultural expectations, structural barriers, emotional blind spots and the shifting meaning of work itself.

For the first time in India’s corporate history, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z sit in the same meeting rooms. It sounds like richness. In reality, it often creates friction.

Baby Boomers were shaped by scarcity. Work meant stability. Leadership meant authority.

Gen X was shaped by liberalisation. Work meant proving oneself. Leadership meant competence.

Millennials were shaped by global exposure. Work meant expression. Leadership meant collaboration.

Gen Z is shaped by digital culture. Work means autonomy, meaning, influence and speed. Leadership means authenticity, inclusion and trust.

These are not merely attitudes. They are identities shaped by different eras and different expectations of life. And when identities shift, the very meaning of work begins to shift with them. As work evolves, so does the idea of what leadership should look like. And when leadership itself is being redefined, mentoring cannot remain anchored to an older script. It must evolve to meet the world as it is today.

But it has not.

The young want conversation. The older offer instruction.

The young seek meaning. The older speak of loyalty.

The young expect psychological safety. The older expect resilience.

The young look for vulnerability. The older were trained to hide it.

This is why mentoring feels misaligned — the philosophies of work no longer match.

Many senior professionals genuinely want to mentor. Their intentions are sincere. Their desire to contribute is real. But they often miss the rapidly evolving context in which younger talent operates.

Communication styles have shifted from formal to fluid.

Consumers have changed, demanding speed, design and instant responsiveness.

Work culture has turned hybrid, dissolving old hierarchies.

Digital-led models have transformed how teams collaborate and how decisions are made.

Thinking itself has become faster, more iterative and more experimental.

A leader shaped by the analogue world now mentors someone shaped entirely by the digital one. Without meaning to, they miss the signals, incentives and anxieties shaping the younger generation. Which is why modern mentoring requires as much learning as teaching.

The decline is not due to a lack of talent or care. It has deeper causes.

• Leaders are overwhelmed by speed: Calendar-driven leadership leaves no space for slow reflection. Mentoring requires presence, not multitasking. But organisations reward busyness, not depth.

• Companies prioritise efficiency, not maturity: We promote people based on delivery, not on their ability to guide others. Emotional generosity is not measured, so it is not valued.

• Middle managers are exhausted: They carry pressure from above and expectations from below. A drained manager cannot be a generous mentor.

• Digital overstimulation has replaced thoughtful dialogue: People consume leadership clips online and mistake it for wisdom. Knowledge is abundant. Context is scarce. Mentoring lives in context.

• Many senior leaders fear becoming irrelevant: To mentor well, you must accept that someone younger will surpass you. Not every leader is emotionally ready for that. Unacknowledged insecurity closes the door to mentoring long before time constraints do.

Mentors do not exist to hand out answers. They offer something far more enduring: confidence. They help people see beyond their fears and widen their sense of possibility. They shape leaders-in-the-making by teaching them how to think, not by prescribing what to think. Their impact comes not from content, but from presence — the steady reassurance that someone has your back as you learn to grow. And this is precisely why, when mentoring collapses, culture begins to collapse quietly with it, long before anyone notices what has been lost.

The future demands a new mentoring model — faster, humbler, more empathetic and more contextual.

• Move from hierarchy to human connection: Title does not build trust. Listening does.

• Train leaders to mentor, not merely manage: Feedback is a craft. Vulnerability is a skill. Reflection is a discipline.

• Make micro-mentoring mainstream: Meaningful mentoring often happens in five-minute conversations after a tough meeting, not in formal calendars.

• Reward leaders who build leaders: What gets measured gets respected. If mentoring is not a performance metric, it will remain optional.

• Build rituals that allow wisdom to flow: Reverse mentoring. Story circles. Intergenerational dialogues. Design-led thinking pods. Wisdom needs infrastructure.

You cannot outsource wisdom, and you cannot automate courage. An organisation cannot hope to build tomorrow’s leaders if today’s leaders have stopped teaching. Mentoring is not a perk to be offered when time permits. It is an investment in continuity, the cultural pension fund that safeguards an organisation’s future. In an age where AI can replicate information but not human insight, mentoring remains the one competitive advantage that cannot be digitised, delegated or replaced.