Insights from Serendis Leadership Directors, Maud Lindley, Bianca Havas and Tim Youle
There is a shift happening in how organisations relate to change. Not in the volume of it. Experienced practitioners will tell you the scale of change has remained fairly consistent over two decades. The difference is in the nature of it. Multiple transformation fronts are now converging simultaneously: structural reorganisation, process re-engineering, AI-driven role disruption, and shifting employee expectations. These are not sequential. They are concurrent.
That simultaneous convergence changes everything. What organisations now require is adaptive capacity. The ability to evolve continuously, not just survive episodically.
In our most recent webinar, Serendis Directors Bianca Havas, Tim Youle and I explored what this means in practice: for leaders, for culture, and for the design of mentoring programs as a genuine lever for adaptive leadership.
The Gap Between Intent and Experience
One of the most consistent patterns Bianca observes when working alongside organisations in transformation is a gap. Not an intentional one, but a structural one. The gap is between how leaders perceive the change and how it is being experienced on the ground.
The filtered information that reaches senior leaders rarely captures the full texture of the operational reality. People implementing change at the coal face carry both the weight of business-as-usual delivery and the cognitive load of ongoing transformation. Middle managers, in particular, sit at the hardest intersection: responsible upward for outcomes, and downward for culture.
What is often missing is the capacity to listen to feedback widely and adapt to it in the flow of the transformation.
Tim adds an important dimension: the threat that each employee experiences is not uniform. Using the SCARF model as a framework to identify the different values individuals might hold more strongly than others (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness), he notes that leaders often default to assuming others experience threat the same way they do.
The more effective approach is to understand the specific threat driver for each person, and respond with that specificity.
Ambiguity Is Not a Problem to Solve
A critical leadership capability for this environment is the ability to sit comfortably in ambiguity, and to model that composure for their teams without inducing anxiety.
This is harder than it sounds. Many leaders have built their credibility on having answers. The cultural expectation, in many organisations, is still that clarity signals competence. But in environments where change is genuinely novel and fast-moving, projecting false certainty is counterproductive. Teams can sense the gap between what is said and what is known.
As Bianca put it: “How do we help leaders role model saying, ‘I don’t know yet’? Because these changes are so fast that the ambiguity will be there all the time.”
The leaders who are most effective in these environments are those who can pair transparency about uncertainty with clarity of priority. Not “here is the full picture,” because that may not be available. Rather: “here is what matters most in the next three weeks, and here is what you can set aside.”
Mentoring as an Adaptive Leadership Tool
This is where mentoring programs shift from being a talent development activity to something more strategic.
Across the structured mentoring programs Serendis facilitates spanning multiple sectors, a notable data point has emerged this year. When asked about the key drivers of career decisions, mentee participants who are 10 to 15 years into their careers shifted their responses meaningfully. Where growth, purpose, and fulfilment once dominated, job security and remuneration now lead. The change environment is registering, and people are looking for anchoring and safety.
Mentoring, when structured well, can address this need. Bianca identifies several mechanisms through which mentoring directly supports adaptive leadership.
- First, it surfaces information that formal structures tend to filter. Mentors will share in a trusted, one-to-one relationship what they will not raise in a team meeting or a survey. That information is often the most operationally relevant and becomes extremely valuable to provide more clarity, direction and safety to a mentee who is experiencing acute transformation in their day-to-day role.
- Second, mentoring conversations create the conditions for co-creation rather than a top-down approach. Gartner research points to co-creation as a defining feature of effective change leadership. When mentees from different parts of an organisation are in structured conversations with mentors across divisions, informal bridges form that support the formal change architecture, connections that cannot be manufactured through org charts.
- Third, it accelerates individual movement through the change curve. When people have a trusted space to process uncertainty, they tend to move through it faster. Rumination decreases, clarity builds and confidence returns.
Tim adds a dimension that is easy to overlook: mentoring helps individuals examine and reframe the narratives they carry about change. In uncertainty, the human brain creates sense-making shortcuts. Those shortcuts form narratives, and narratives, if left unexamined, often undermine the very agility organisations are trying to build. Mentors can help mentees notice those narratives and ask whether they are resourceful or limiting.
Designing Programs That Deliver
For HR and L&D leaders who are considering whether and how to use mentoring as part of a transformation strategy, the design decisions matter significantly.
There are several principles that Serendis has found consistently effective:
- A structured framework is essential, not prescriptive, but enough to hold momentum, expectations, and accountability. Without structure, mentees, who tend to prioritise their own development last, will deprioritise the program.
- Cross-functional matching amplifies impact. Matching mentors and mentees within the same team or function is comfortable, but limiting. Pairing across divisions builds the informal networks that change depends on, while simultaneously deepening the mentee’s understanding of how transformation is landing across the organisation.
- Middle managers are the transmission mechanism for change. Involving them explicitly in mentoring programs, whether as mentors or mentees, signals organisational recognition of their role and builds the capabilities they most need.
- Program length matters. The most valuable conversations happen in the second half of a program, once trust has been established. A minimum of six months is recommended. Below that, the relationship is often just warming up when the program ends.
Finally, the healthcare example Bianca shared during the webinar offers a compelling illustration of what is possible at the other end of the design spectrum. A digital transformation had met significant frontline resistance. The issue was not technology reluctance. It was that clinical staff felt excluded from the decisions that directly shaped their work. A reverse mentoring program, in which clinical staff mentored senior leaders on operational realities, produced two concrete outcomes: the implementation timeline was extended by six weeks, and the training program was redesigned based on real workflow conditions. Resistance did not disappear, but it transformed. Staff moved from obstruction to constructive engagement. They began raising problems alongside proposed solutions.
The Strategic Opportunity
Change is not going to slow down. The organisations that develop the infrastructure to move through it with agile leadership, will be the ones that retain capability, protect culture, and outperform.
Mentoring programs, designed with the right intent and the right structure, are part of that infrastructure. They build individual adaptive leadership capability. They create information flows that formal structures miss. They develop the coaching capacity of leaders at the moments when coaching matters most.
The leaders who will guide their organisations through sustained transformation are not necessarily those with the most experience of change. They are those who have built the relationships, the habits, and the networks to move others through it with them. Mentoring builds all three.
Serendis Leadership partners with organisations to design and facilitate mentoring and leadership development programs that build capability and support strategic goals. MentorKey, our leadership capability platform, provides the structure, prompts and rhythm that sustain meaningful workplace conversations.
