Benefits of Mentoring
What is a Mentor?
A mentor is someone who can guide you to achieve your goals. Anyone can benefit both personally and professionally from having a mentor. A mentor serves as a role model sharing knowledge, expertise, insights, lessons learned, resources, and best practices to guide you in your path to success. They also share their professional network to increase your opportunities. Mentors motivate and inspire others, develop future leaders and work to improve your skills and abilities. Mentors help build and expand others’ abilities and skills. A mentor can help you increase your work performance, shorten your learning curve, boost your morale, and expand your career horizons, opportunities, and networks.
What is (and is not) Mentoring?
Mentoring is a voluntary and reciprocal learning activity that requires dedication and commitment both from the mentor and the learner. It is a time intensive and recurring activity that allows both parties to learn, solve problems by finding solutions that are feasible, and share knowledge. The mentoring relationship may cover a variety of topics. Good mentors provide an environment of physiological safety for the learner and helps learners investigate and execute ideas with confidence.
Mentoring is an active endeavor where both parties need to commit time and effort to be achieve the desired results. Mentors do not direct others. Instead, they will provide their advice, opinions, and guidance for the learner to decide what works best for them. Although mentors will transfer some of their skills and knowledge with the learners, and they may recommend training, the learning happens in an more informal setting and organically as part of the idea and problem solving exploration.
Mentoring is not a “one size fits all” approach. Both mentors and learners need to feel comfortable with the topics to be discussed and the expected goals and outcomes. Typically, once the learner achieves their goals, they will be able to perform independently and the mentoring relationship will no longer be needed. It is possible to have multiple mentors at different stages of someone’s career depending on the skills needed and the goals to be achieved. Learners are encouraged to leverage the strengths of the mentor to achieve their specific goals.
Types of Mentoring
Mentoring relationships can be formal or informal. In formal mentoring relationships, the learner identifies the objectives they will like to accomplish and will work with the mentor on a plan to achieve their goals. Formal mentoring relationships typically have a start and end date for the engagement.
On the other hand, there is informal mentoring. Informal mentoring relationships can be between the learner with a co-worker, supervisor, teacher, friend or a parent. This type of relationship is more casual and the learner is just seeking guidance with a specific skill or knowledge gap.
The Benefits of Mentoring
There are many benefits of having a mentor. Here are some of them:
- Gain confidence and increase your morale
- Learn new skills and techniques
- Increase your network
- Gain a different perspective
- Improve your critical thinking and problem-solving skills
- Improve your leadership aptitude
- Learn new resources and how to use them
Are you ready for mentoring?
Send us an email to book a free mentoring session to discuss your needs and how we can help you!