At Partnering for Performance, all three of these skills are utilized with our clients. In order to provide some clarity around these three disciplines, below are the quick definitions of each. I’m finding more and more clients are asking for the mentoring piece, either for themselves or for one of their staff, so the focus of this article is Business Mentoring. However, keep in mind, that all three disciplines are often used together; individually or separately, success is the outcome.
- Management consulting is based on the expertise, knowledge, skill set and technology of the consultant. The consultant’s skill set is focused on building their own internal resources, in order to apply them for the client company’s benefit.
- Business coaching assumes that the client has the necessary capability and helps them to discover it for themselves.
- Business mentoring targets the personal development of people who are well versed in their fundamental technical skills but need extra assistance in other skills areas, expertise or knowledge.
What is the role and value of the business mentor?
Business mentors lever their knowledge and experience by providing advice, counsel, network contacts and political and cultural know-how, together with ongoing personal support and encouragement. The business mentor’s interest is to foster the career development of the mentee.
At its best, business mentoring is a process that activates the skills of the mentee within their current role and helps groom them for their next. Business mentoring helps them to produce high quality decisions that define them, their authority and their effectiveness. A business mentor provides a confidential sounding board, thinking room, and support for working through crucial and often complex decisions. Business mentoring can also help organizations to retain their best people and increase staff loyalty.
What are the benefits for the business mentor?
The primary beneficiary of a business mentoring program will be the mentee, but those who mentor can find themselves benefiting in unexpected ways. In the most successful business mentoring relationships there is always something in it for the mentor, not just for the mentee.
Benefits for the business mentor can include:
- personal development – growing by growing others
- increased job satisfaction
- honing of skills such as coaching, listening, giving feedback and adapting your leadership style
- development of self-knowledge and self-awareness.
While these may be “softer” benefits, there are also harder benefits that your mentee can deliver to you:
- sharing their network of contacts with you
- giving you a temperature check of the organization (what is really going on)
- raising your visibility within parts of the organization that would not otherwise be aware of you.
What are the benefits for the mentee?
A business mentor, by virtue of their experience, will be able to help the mentee steer through the organization. Perhaps more importantly, the business mentor will help the mentee to understand some of the more informal ways of getting things done and some of the unwritten and unstated ways of working (the world of corporate politics!), and therefore develop the mentee’s professional expertise and career.
The business mentor is someone with whom the mentee can discuss and work through concerns or opportunities that they may not want to expose to their immediate superior. Indeed, it may be that the superior is one of the mentee’s concerns. Remember, the superior may well be under pressure to come up with short-term deliverables, and may therefore not be sympathetic to the mentee’s longer-term career goals.
The mentee may feel that they are working in an environment that does not fit with their preferred ways of working. They may not even be aware of this, perhaps just having an undefined feeling of things not being quite right. Talking with someone such as a business mentor, who can bring a wider perspective, may help the mentee to recognize what is happening and identify the culture that is right for them.
Part II will cover the mentor | mentee relationship.
Have you had a mentor in your career? What made this relationship successful? If it wasn’t successful, why not?
