No two coaching programs look exactly alike, and honestly, that's how it should be.
Some partners hand pick every name on the roster. Others let anyone raise their hand. A few run three completely different structures and never miss a beat. Mento and our Partner Success team is here to help you figure out what is right for you, and how to do so seamlessly.
What follows are the shapes we see most often, drawn from real partners but told as composites rather than any one company's story.
If you're figuring out which one fits you, that's the kind of conversation we want to have with you. Tell us what you liked and didn't like about a coaching program you've run before (yours or a previous vendor's), and we'll help you figure out which of these shapes solves for it.
Someone builds the list.
By far the most common shape we see, close to a third of our partners run it this way. Someone on the inside builds the roster directly: examples being an HRBP working from a talent review, a department head who already knows exactly who's stretching right now, an executive personally staging their leadership team into coaching a few names at a time.
The mechanism varies (a formal 9-box exercise, a straightforward list from HR, a founder picking people one at a time) but the through-line doesn't: a person decides who's ready, not a form.
We like this shape because intent shows up in engagement. Nobody ends up in coaching by accident, and members who were chosen tend to show up differently than members who signed up because a form happened to be open. It also scales in both directions: we've seen this work for a five person leadership team and for a sixty seat cohort split cleanly across executive and leadership tiers.
Where it shines: engagement runs higher because nobody ends up in coaching by accident, and the logic scales cleanly from five seats to sixty.
Real examples include:
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A security software company runs two staggered cohorts a year, 17 to 23 seats each, mixing executive and leadership members, all sourced from an internal top performers list maintained by HR.
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At one leading AI company, HRBPs across nine business units nominate against a shared pool of 250 eligible managers company-wide. Each HRBP owns their unit's list and submits names on a rolling quarterly basis rather than all at once, so cohorts fill continuously instead of in one big annual push. The shared number keeps every HRBP anchored to the same definition of who's eligible, even though each business unit runs its own nomination conversation on its own timeline.
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A national management firm runs 60 seats split cleanly by level: 25 executive, 35 leadership, with a hard rule that only VP and above qualifies for the executive tier. Nominations move through three steps: a talent review surfaces names, managers approve, and the participant confirms before anyone's added.
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Anyone can raise their hand.
Rarer, but real: partners who let people opt themselves in rather than waiting to be picked. It's a small slice of our base today, but where it shows up, it's usually a deliberate bet that motivation predicts engagement better than title or tenure ever could.