Get A Mentor to Get Ahead

Hi,

I was reading the paper when i came across an article written by John Bittleston on Mentorship to get ahead in corporate success. So what is Mentoring?

Mentoring is helping people tp realise their own abilities. It is not coaching, although the two are not far apart. Coaching involves teaching techniques for achieving short-term and specific, limited objectives. At the right time and for the right purpose, coaching is an impt tool.

Mentoring takes a more holistic view of a person's career, ambitions, needs, and ultimate fulfillment. Every mentor will devote some of his mentoring time to coaching but he will look beyond the immediate future to longer-term rewards and achievements.

A good coach imparts ways of doing things. A good mentor gets his mentee to discover what he really wants and helps him achieve it, but he does not achieve it for him. As the saying goes - "If you truly care for someone, you help them to stand on their own feet, not on yours."

To be helpful, the mentor must understand something about work his mentee is doing.
Different company has adopted different models of their In-Company Mentoring. While there is no one RIGHT way to introduce mentoring, the following seems to be most efficient, effective and rewarding one.

The best mentor is one who has been selected by the mentee. Sympathetic understanding, a predisposition to listen attentively and shared interests are the basic tools of good mentoring. No mentor has the same amount of these for everyone. Good communication between mentor and mentee depends on chemistry.

Authority is generally a bad basis for mentoring because the lines of command are difficult to disentangle from an essentially personal relationship. A mentee is left in an ambiguous position as t what his response can be. Telling the boss what to do with his own ideas is still not advisable as a basis of promotion and recognition.

It follows from this that any formality or procedure is in dnager of getting a mentor/mentee relationship off to a stilted or shaky start. A company that wants to introduce mentoring has to be sensitive to the fact that personal likes and dislikes play a legitimate role, in much the same way as they do with counselling.

Rgds
Sean