Mentoring is by no means a new concept but it is one that I feel should be explored if you are looking to further grow and develop both personally and professionally. The mentor will usually be more experienced in areas that are to be explored and improved upon. They use their own experiences to help avoid common pitfalls as well as to push the development boundaries in a trusting environment. It’s easy to stay in your comfort zone, but it’s much more satisfying to jump out of it and grab opportunities that will change the way you and your business performs. Just having a competent sounding board can make all the difference as can guidance on enhancing skills you already have and acquiring new ones.
A mentoring relationship challenges you to push yourself and hopefully become the best version of yourself. A mentor may use coaching methods to facilitate this change which will bring out those often hidden skills people are afraid of unleashing. A mentor won’t come in to your business and work for you, but they will be able to assist you improving performance and in turn efficiency. If the relationship is to work, there has to be mutual trust and respect and the direction of avenues explored are introduced by the mentee.
There are many benefits of a mentoring relationship to both the mentor and mentee. A mentor can use their knowledge and experience in helping someone else achieve their dreams, or goals and a mentee can offer fresh in sights to the mentor keeping their own development current. There are always new possibilities to explored, and sometimes it take a little prod in the right direction to unearth them. It can be a lonely world being in business for yourself and having someone else involved who is watching your back can really help you, especially in the early stages of a new business where many aspects of running a business may be unfamiliar. A mentor who runs their own business will already have been where you are now and can use this experience to help you through your situation. Having new ideas in business is fantastic, turning them in to a profitable outcome is another story. Having someone there to guide you from ideas to results in a positive and functional way can only add to your development right?
Mentoring is also adopted in companies looking to improve the overall performance of their staff. The mentor is usually someone else who works in the same company and who is further up the career ladder. This is all very well but if it was a line manager the results may be restricted by the work relationship and the mentee may not feel they are able to open up. If it is someone they don’t work with directly, it can have an extremely positive effect on employee productivity.
