Charmain Bogue on Why Mentoring Programs Fail When Nobody Measures What Happens Next

Charmain Bogue

The difference between matching people and actually developing them

Most mentoring programs start with good intentions and a matching algorithm. Pair an experienced professional with someone earlier in their career. Schedule a few meetings. Hope something useful happens. When the program ends, collect a satisfaction survey and call it a success. The model is popular, funded generously, and almost never evaluated on the one metric that matters: did the mentee's career actually change?

The problem is that satisfaction and development are not the same thing. A mentee can enjoy every meeting and still leave the program without any measurable change in how they think, work, or advance. Enjoyment is easy to produce. Growth is not. The question that most programs avoid is straightforward: did this actually help? And if so, how do you know?

Charmain Bogue has been involved in mentoring work that takes that question seriously. She has served as a mentor to connect women returning to the workforce with professional guidance and structured support. She has also been a mentor and judge atone of the largest startup accelerators in the world, where the stakes are higher and the feedback is more direct. 

Those are three very different contexts: workforce reentry, startup development, and university-level leadership. The common thread in Bogue's approach is that mentoring needs to produce something specific. Not just encouragement, but a plan. Not just advice, but accountability. Not just connection, but a clear sense of whether the time invested moved the needle on something that the mentee identified at the start.

Her professional background supports that view. Charmain Bogue has spent her career in environments where programs were expected to produce measurable outcomes. In her coaching and advisory work, she designed training sessions and executive coaching engagements aimed at strengthening leadership capacity and improving governance. Those were not casual development efforts. They had goals, timelines, and defined results. When a training program did not produce the expected improvement, it was revised or replaced. That kind of feedback loop is exactly what most mentoring programs lack.

She also worked independently as a Strategic Advisor and Executive Coach, partnering with executives and boards to design and execute plans that advanced education, workforce, and leadership initiatives. That work gave her a clear view of what happens when organizations invest in development without structure: people attend programs, collect certificates, and return to the same habits. The investment is made, but the return is invisible.

The mentoring programs that work, the ones that actually change trajectories, share a few characteristics. They set clear goals at the beginning. They track progress at regular intervals. And they are honest with participants about what is working and what is not.. Founders receive direct feedback about their business, their pitch, and their readiness to scale. The conversations are not comfortable. They are useful.

One program Charmain Bogue supports , the approach is different in tone but similar in structure. Women returning to work after a career break need more than encouragement. They need specific guidance on how to position their experience, how to rebuild professional networks, and how to manage the transition without losing confidence in the process. Bogue's mentoring in that program focuses on those concrete steps, not abstract empowerment.

Part of the problem is that measurement feels clinical in a context that is supposed to be personal. Mentoring is a relationship, and nobody wants to reduce a relationship to a spreadsheet. But tracking outcomes does not mean eliminating the human element. It means respecting it enough to verify that it is producing what everyone involved agreed it should produce. A mentoring relationship without direction is just a recurring calendar event.

The satisfaction survey at the end of a mentoring program tells you whether people enjoyed the experience. It does not tell you whether their careers moved. Until programs start measuring the second thing with the same attention they give the first, they will keep producing warm feelings and unchanged outcomes. Charmain Bogue has seen enough of both to know the difference, and she builds her mentoring work around closing it.