What is Mentoring and Why Are Mentors Important

What is Mentoring?
Mentoring is one of the oldest, most effective forms of influence and knowledge sharing. Being a mentor means that you take someone under your wing, and offer them knowledge and/or wisdom about their career path. A mentor, (usually a person older than you), will help guide their mentee’s professional development with no expectation of monetary gain. They can be a friend, relative, coworker, previous boss, etc. — essentially, anyone who has gained more experience than you in your chosen profession.

Mentoring vs. Coaching
Mentors must have some specific organizational or industry knowledge and consider themselves task experts. Coaches need no particular organizational or industry expertise and consider themselves process experts. Coaches also bring an objective process to help someone articulate and achieve their goals, are about personal perspective, personal impact, skill development and specialized knowledge transfer.

Mentoring vs. Managing
Mentors provide an additional and supplemental development tool for companies and provide a broad view of the future. Managers support the learning process while also monitoring performance while having day-to-day direct authority. Managers also have roles that are dominant and shouldn’t be affected by mentoring an employee, and they should endorse experimentation via mentoring in a way that allows for the possibility of mistakes and support the learning process.

Mentoring is Important for Business
As a business owner, you can use mentoring to nurture and grow your employees — it can help to navigate company culture, solve problems and open up windows for career advancement. Is readying employees for management a task that is high on your to-do list? Mentoring does just that — it ensures your talent queue is filled with people ready to lead. Mentoring can also be an effective tool for recruitment purposes.

7 Qualities That Makes a Good Mentor

• A desire to develop others and see them succeed
• A desire to help others without any kind of monetary compensation
• An appropriate level of commitment, time and energy
• An up-to-date knowledge and skill set
• A willingness to share stories of failure
• An openness to learn new things
• Previous experience guiding others

7 Qualities That Makes a Good Mentee

• An appropriate level of commitment and focus
• A willingness to ask for help
• An openness to try new things
• An ability to apply new things on the job
• An ability to accept and act on feedback and criticism
• An ability to hold responsibility and accountability
• An availability and willingness to meet on a recurring basis

Have you ever been a mentor? Have you ever been a mentee? What other important things are there to know about the mentoring process? Let us know below, or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.