Welcome to issue #26 of Pondering Leadership: A Deliberate and Thoughtful, Yet Informal Look at Leading and Managing. To my new subscribers: Welcome! Please like and share my newsletter. We are building a wonderful community of leaders and managers. Last week, I wrote about questions to ask candidates while you are interviewing them. There are so many great ones!! There is no need to ask bad questions or make candidates uncomfortable. In this issue, I am discussing mentoring.
For someone just starting out, making a connection with someone established in the field is crucial to managing a career. Advising someone new in their career is a great way to give back to your profession and help bring up the next generation of leaders. Your mentee will benefit, but you will also get something out of being a mentor.
Mentee Benefits
A mentor can help with career direction. As we grow in our jobs, having someone who already has a bit of a career path is a great resource to help figure out our next step.
Having someone to go to when we run into problems with projects or staff is so helpful. A mentor can help guide someone through tough situations.
Mentors can introduce their mentees to other leaders in the field, which helps mentees build their networks.
When we are new in our careers, it can be hard to figure out which professional associations to join, which conferences to attend, which networking meetings to go to. A mentor can help with this.
Mentor Benefits
Talking about your career, how you manage your staff, how you turned around a situation etc., with someone with less experience can be invigorating. Sometimes, when we are having a rough day, talking to someone about why we chose our profession can be a reminder of what we enjoy about our situation. When I am mentoring someone, seeing their excitement and interest in what I am doing reminds me why I like what I am doing. It is very motivating.
Depending on how long you have been in the field, newer managers can provide you with information on trends, new technology or practices that you have not experienced yet. Learning is a two-way street when it comes to mentoring.
We always need to cultivate a relevant professional network no matter where we are in our career. A mentee can introduce you to people in their cohort who you may want to add to your network.
Mentoring new managers is critical to creating good managers. When new managers do not know what to do and do not know who to ask, they often make bad decisions, which we do not want. By mentoring someone new, you are saving people from having a bad manager. (I’m mostly kidding here.)
Time Commitment
Mentoring does not have to take a lot of time. Connecting with your mentee for 30 minutes or so monthly works for the mentor and mentee. Generally, mentorships are for a year. But, if you are not ready to make that kind of time commitment, try being a conference mentor. Your professional conference planning staff is probably looking for people to mentor first-time attendees. This is a significantly smaller time commitment. You may have one or two conversations leading up to the conference and then a couple of check-ins with them while you are at the event. This is a great way to see if mentorship is for you.
Your Turn…
Have you had a great experience mentoring someone? Let me know what you think! You can comment in Discussion.
Thank you for reading issue #26 of Pondering Leadership. I hope to see you next Thursday afternoon for issue #27 when I will write about ways to avoid burnout. Thank you for reading and supporting my writing.
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