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Mentoring Matters
Mentoring matters: so why should you consider it?
Mentoring is a tried and tested technique to broadening your career horizons and developing professionally – alongside a multitude of additional social benefits. And it’s not just beneficial for the mentee. Mentors themselves can reap tangible, career-defining rewards from enrolling in a mentorship programme.
Read on to discover the benefits mentoring can have on your career and social skills, and why you should consider giving it a try.
For mentors:
Providing mentorship is an excellent example of putting workplace skills into practise.
- You’ll strengthen your active listening – that’s the ability to act on what you’re being told verbally and non-verbally, by providing meaningful constructive feedback that details next steps.
- Confiding with other mentors will provide the opportunity to construct a dependable support network.
- Helping a younger colleague by letting them tap into your experience and expertise can lead to a heightened sense of job satisfaction and performance.
- Your understanding of IMI as an organisation will be broadened by building a relationship with someone you might not usually be in contact with. By extension, your ability to understand other people and their unique perspectives will grow.
- You will serve as an example of IMI’s values, attitudes and behaviour.
Mentoring is a two-way street:
“Far from being a simple unbalanced relationship of help given by an altruistic older person to a younger less experienced person, the mentoring relationship looks like a balanced exchange” - Grima, Paille, Mejia, ‘Exploring the benefits of mentoring activities for the mentor’, Career Development International, Volume 19, No. 4, 2014, page. 473.
For mentees:
The benefits of mentorship for the mentee are perhaps more obvious than the possible advantages for the mentor.
Firstly, mentees can gain an expert insight into their possible future career path. This might include experience-based advice and guidance that can increase your understanding of IMI’s vision and values – not to mention providing a more general understanding of working at IMI.
You might also:
- Be set challenges designed to allow you to excel, therefore increasing your confidence and self-worth.
- Be introduced to more influential IMI employees, broadening your career network and relationships.
- You will learn how to reflect on your work, increasing future efficiency during tasks.
- You will be immersed in IMI’s culture, taking inspiration from the mentor who will embody IMI’s values and vision.
- You will gain practical experience of receiving feedback, and then implementing it into future iterations of work.
- By communicating feedback, ideas and asking questions, you’ll develop a strong professional communication skill, and learn to do so with confidence.
Research suggests that the dyadic structure of mentoring lends itself more to an informal relationship rather than a formal one. This doesn’t mean that mentoring should be disorganised or whimsical, rather the character of the relationship should be outlined by both the mentor and the mentee to determine a comfortable structure and should ultimately provide autonomy for both people.
Research conducted by behavioural psychologists and published in the academic journal Career Development International has been used to write this article. If you’re interested in reading the journal article itself, then please click here to open a PDF of the article itself.