Business Bites: Why mentoring matters

Mentors and mentees can learn from each other

Mentoring matters even when you are well into your career – and can bring great rewards. Read on to find out why and how…

Mentoring —both having a mentor and being a mentor—can prove invaluable for those later in their careers, not just those on their way up. To be successful, you need help from others, and mentoring ambitious young people creates a network of rising professionals who can help inform you and make valuable connections for you.

Five ways mentoring benefits the mentor’s career

Encouragement from a mentor can be critical to success, particularly for early-career professionals. But what’s in it for the mentor?

1. It helps you become a more effective leader
A mentoring experience can help you develop your own leadership skills which you can then use to advise, coach and develop your own staff.

2. It helps you to better understand your own experience
Your experiences may seem quite ordinary to you but when you participate in a mentoring program you will see how beneficial and helpful those experiences can be to those who are upcoming in your profession.

3. It hones your transferable skill-set
Mentoring teaches you how to accommodate others’ ways of thinking and working.

4. It gets you out of your comfort zone
Mentoring gives you the chance to get out of your comfort zone and use your expertise in other areas. It also improves your listening skills and using your listening skills to improve your ability to give guidance.

5. The rewards are a two-way street
You will learn that you don’t have to be in the exact same discipline to be helpful to a mentee. You will also find that mentees have a lot to offer the mentor—you may find yourself learning from them.

Mentoring isn’t just about helping other people, or about being altruistic, it can make us better managers and better leaders. Mentoring, therefore, remains important throughout life.

Mentoring helps you keep in touch with the younger generations. As a leader of any institution, knowing the next generation’s perspective can greatly influence your thinking. A rising professional in their 20s, for example, might have a very different perspective on achieving gender equality than your older contemporaries have. Mentoring gives you access to people of different backgrounds, with different perspectives, which can help to influence your own thinking.

Mentoring younger people can also give you optimism about the future. It connects you to people who not only care about their careers and professions but about trying to improve the world. It gives you insight into how younger generations work, talk, and communicate.

Value of reverse mentoring

Reverse mentoring is all about harnessing the fresh perspective of tomorrow’s business leaders. It’s where a younger individual mentors an older one in areas such as emerging technology and social media trends, offering valuable business insight.

Reverse mentoring was pioneered just over a decade ago by former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch, and has been embraced by a growing number of companies, including Ernst & Young, General Motors, Citibank, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, Cisco and Procter & Gamble – all of which now offer formal reverse mentoring programmes. It has also taken off in smaller companies, which see it as an opportunity to give their business a competitive edge.

Citibank, for example, ran a reverse mentoring programme that worked on specific projects; it took a fresh look at mobile payments, communicating with millennial generation customers, social media, the digital retail business and creating compelling job pitches for young talent.

Junior mentors can provide first-hand knowledge of a younger customer base; this is critical for companies aiming to tap into the youth market, and can provide insight into how to best use social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and X – and signpost to apps that will help with organisation and productivity. They can also help managers understand how to motivate and retain young workers. And they know how to digitally connect with influencers who can send business their way.

From the junior mentor’s point of view, it is a fantastic opportunity to network at high levels, and to develop confidence and experience in relating to a senior manager and being empowered to express their ideas.

Reverse mentoring can re-energise a company by providing an input of energy and ideas from a motivated younger person. However, it’s important for mentoring partners to be ready for change and be willing to take the time to learn.

Find out more about mentoring on the ABDO mentoring platform.

Read more articles about mentoring in the Leadership section of the ABDO Business Support Hub.