Most people go through life with someone to rely on, someone whom they trust and look to for advice, who shares his or her wisdom and knowledge obtained through years of life and experiences not experience by others. This is what defines a mentorship, a relationship between two people where one has more knowledge and experience, and helps to guide the less knowledgeable, less experienced one through life lessons and situations. This paper will describe what makes a person a great mentor and why having great mentors in a work setting makes for a better business.
Throughout the course of a lifetime, a person will know many people who have more experience and knowledge than him or herself, but not every one of these people are necessarily good mentors; great mentors have many characteristics that separate them from being just another person with more knowledge and experience. A great mentor knows how to listen to his or her mentee and deducts which direction he or she wants to go with a decision, then tried to actively guide him or her towards that decisions, without being forceful.
A great mentor is practical and draws upon his or her experiences to provide relevant, and specific, insight into a situation and educates his or her mentee about decisions, goals, and life, while making themselves accessible to their mentee. A great mentor knows when to be critical, but does so in a supportive manner that encourages growth and shows that they truly care about their mentee’s development (Richardson, 2005).
In recent years, businesses have started implementing programs that foster a mentee and mentor relationship, relationships that provide lower and middle rung employees someone who he or she can look to for guidance on navigating the corporate ladder and provide relevant job related experience. The benefits of a mentorship program do not stop at just junior employees though, senior employees acting as mentors to his or her subordinates also enjoy benefits, such as staying up to date with job related information and technology. Additionally, the mentorship program goes beyond the reaches of just the mentee and mentor, it also effects the employer and has the potential to effect the entire industry and profession.
Mentors provide his or her mentees with someone who has been around the industry/job field and therefore has a wider variety of knowledge and experience to hand down to the mentee. Services provided by a mentor may include: demonstrating a job or task that the mentee is unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, helping his or her mentee work through a problem, or providing insight on the work of a mentee; maybe most important of all, mentors provide his or her mentees with the knowledge needed in order to further his or her career, and may open paths through networking (Stone, 2007).
The benefits of the mentorship program extend to the employers themselves; employers who have an active mentorship program for its employees have seen a significant increase in productivity than their competitors who do not employ a mentorship program. The on the job benefits of a mentorship for the employer include: employees cutting down on mistakes due to the help from a mentor (which in turns benefits the company in way of decreased costs related to on the job mistakes or mishaps), employees reported higher job satisfaction, which results in a decrease of turnover rate for the employer, and provides a healthy work environment that may be used to draw in new and highly regarded employees.
As mentioned before, mentors, even the highest ranking, most senior employees, can also benefit from the mentorship program; mentors have reported having higher job satisfaction, due to the nature of the mentee/mentor relationship, where the mentor acts as an advisor and guide.
Mentorship programs foster an environment where mentors listen to his or her mentees, who are junior to his or her position; this increased communication leads senior workers to better understand issues that lower level employees face, often leading the lower level workers to regard the senior workers as better supervisors. An additional benefit to the mentor is the networking aspect; mentees do not always stay mentees, often they move up the corporate ladder, and when they do, the mentor now has an additional contact.
The reaches of the mentorship program can also be seen on a higher level, affecting a profession or industry as a whole; a strong mentorship program allows a company, and an industry on a higher level, to focus more on the growth of the company, rather than the training aspect, as training is seen as a full time process in the mentorship program, that allows employees to see more long term benefits. The mentorship program also encourages workers to become deeper involved in his or her careers, such as joining or leading an off duty professional organization that may lead to further career development; when employees work on becoming better employees on his or her of time, it strengthens the company and the industry as a whole (Tingum, n.d.).
Training is highly encouraged, and a core foundation of the mentorship program; a company that loses a senior employee could potentially be losing a lot of valuable information, but if he or she shared that knowledge before leaving the company, the chances of his or her skill set staying in the business is increased. The transfer of knowledge is an important aspect of productivity within a company, but becomes even bigger in regards to employee retention. Once an employee has the necessary knowledge and skills to be successful at a business, the business would be well inclined to keep him or her around; the mentorship program has been shown to increase retention within companies who employ it, with estimates that retention is one third higher within companies with a mentorship program, than those without a mentorship program (Clutterback, 2011).
Retention is improved by the mentorship program for various reasons, for example: employees feel more valued by the company, due to the relationships they have forged; more opportunities are provided to build upon a career; when mentees address his or her problems to a mentor, it is also passing through a junior and senior level workers, allowing for corrective actions to be conducted; senior level employees who may be bored with his or her job, are rejuvenated by the mentorship process; and the company becomes a much better outlook for job prospects, both externally, from getting top talented recruited to the company from school or other job environments, or internally, where employees desire to look for a job within the same company, rather than look outside of the company for another job opening.
The company becomes a more desirable work environment, in part due to the networking aspect of the mentee/mentor relationship, and the fact that employees enrolled in a mentorship program are nearly five times as likely to look for job promotions from within, rather than search for external sources of jobs (Clutterback, 2011).
Retention becomes even more valuable when a country’s economy is in a recession, this is due to the fact that many companies will look to reduce the number of employees they keep on payroll, in order to reduce the company’s overall budget; typically, only the most productive and well connected employees are kept around, which serves to further increase his or her value as an employee to the company.
At the end of a recession, the job market returns to a more desirable level, and becomes more active; this may cause the most talented employees to look for jobs elsewhere. Although mentored employees are more likely to be retained by his or her company, this is one situation where those types of employees may search for an external job source in order to move up the management chain, or receive a pay increase.
Communication skills in a business setting are another highly sought after benefit of the mentorship program; companies that employ a mentorship program produce employees with an increased set of communication skills that are very valuable in a business setting, including: organizational skills that improve written and verbal presentations.
An employee with a mentor is more likely to have valuable and relative skills passed down to him or her, these are skills that have been perfected through years of on the job experience and training; likewise, mentees have been shows to pass on certain skill trains to mentors as well, such as technological skills, an area where junior employees may be more comfortable or adept than his or her senior counterpart. Mentorships also help o a job environment on a personal level, as mentors and mentees have shown to be more comfortable with their coworkers in both a working and nonworking environment.
The mentorship program has shown to have numerous positive effects on every group involved with the process, and even on a higher level, such as the profession or industry. The success of the mentorship program is, in part, due to the passing down of working knowledge and skills from senior to junior employees, and in some instances, junior to senior employees; additionally, the mentorship program has shown to increase company and coworker loyalty and trust, while improving the retention rates, better keeping those highly valued employees within the company, and leads to employees looking for internal promotion, rather than external job opportunities.
