At THE IMPOSSIBLE IS POSSIBLE, we do our best to connect people in need of some guidance with a suiting mentor for a long-term professional relationship. Fact is that people look for mentors. Over 50,000 people every month search for mentorship, and we are happy to give our world best services.
Mentorship can undoubtedly be an important way to offer support to someone and radically affect their life. At the same time, this mentorship can help create stronger bonds between mentors and mentees beyond hierarchical relations.
The GROW Model is a simple four-step process that helps you structure mentoring sessions with team members.
GROW stands for:
- Goal
- Current Reality
- Options (or Obstacles).
- Will (or Way Forward).
The importance of mentorship for mentors in becoming more effective leaders
The importance of mentorship also extends to the mentors. Mentorships are symbiotic relationships that can be fulfilling to both mentors and mentees. For mentees, they can learn from the mentors’ wisdom and lived experience. Mentors can better understand their craft by teaching it and expand their network to their mentees and fellow mentors, too.
People should be mentors to help a hand in contributing to this vision of the future and inspire how the new generation thinks. After all, mentees can be future leaders, entrepreneurs of to-be successful businesses and corporate executives.
Mentors can help inspire meaningful change.
Mentors can instill their vision of the future to the mentees and create long-lasting systemic changes. This means developing connections with aspiring young entrepreneurs who need mentorship.
While the mentee might need some advice from the mentor, in the future, the mentee may bring back the favor to the mentor in other ways, such as business partnerships and introducing them to people they want to meet.
Mentors can become better leaders
By listening to mentees and their concerns and goals for the future, mentors can develop empathy and understanding required to lead those who might think differently from them.
For example, marketing seniors might find it beneficial to mentor search engine marketers on how to navigate through the marketing industry. At the same time, the mentors can learn a thing or two about how search engine optimization is radically changing the way many companies today do marketing.
Within an organization, mentors can help employees increase productivity
Mentees work better when they know what is expected of them. Mentoring employees is not just beneficial for the mentees. By having more effective processes, mentors and executives can go about their marketing plans more effectively.
At the same time, when mentees know what’s expected of them and which projects, they need to take the lead on, there is a lot less back and froths and organizational red tape.
Effective mentorships can help increase overall company productivity and allow it to function more efficiently than before. As the mentor lays down the higher-level vision to the mentee, the latter will better understand their role and their importance within the company
The importance of mentorship for professional socialization
Ultimately, effective mentorships help foster incredibly tight personal and professional bonds between mentors and mentees, deeper understanding, and better collaboration.
Mentorships can create strong relationships
Mentorships help build a connection between mentors and mentees who share common goals. While the mentee learns from the mentor’s wisdom, this can be an intentional investment on the mentor’s part to get something in the future in return, be it a strong network connection or business partnerships in the future.
Moreover, mentorships are two-way relationships that also help mentors get back in touch with the experiences and obstacles that they might have also faced to be where they are. Through this, the mentor can remind themselves of the amount of effort that it took for them to get where they were. Mentees, on the other hand, will be able to figure out how to surmount their problems with this knowledge transfer. A mentoring relationship is ultimately an exercise in empathy.
Mentorships create systems and networks of change
Mentorships can help both mentors and mentees create tight professional networks and systems of change that can lead to lasting impact. For today’s entrepreneurs, this is especially important.
For example, more and more people are getting into online businesses because of a lively community of people that are making a living out of selling their offerings online. These mentorships are helping provide an ecosystem where a new breed of professionals and entrepreneurs who are location independent and can fully work online.
“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.” – Gopendra Patel
Either way, mentors can help you get unstuck by diagnosing your problems or helping you creates an action plan to overcome them.
Want to find the right mentor for you? Join the Impossible Is Possible.
There you have it. Mentorships are important for everyone involved. Mentees can learn practical tips on how to achieve their goals. Teams can become more effective. Mentors can become better leaders. And mentorships overall can foster stronger community bonds.
Why people look for mentors
There are a range of studies about the effects of mentorships, and it would be rather difficult to find one with negative outcome for example.
- Statistically, mentored employees have better career outcomes
- Mentored employees receive the greater number of promotions and higher compensation
- Mentored employees tend to be happier
Most of these done in the context of corporate mentorships. As a private, independent mentorship community, we have had our fair share of our own experiences.
- Mentees look for accountability in their studies
- Mentees look for general guidance
- Mentees look for support in times of vulnerability
- Mentees look for knowledge
This shows by the distribution of our mentees, with roughly 1/3 looking for help with advancing their careers, 1/3 looking for help in their own studies, and 1/3 of mentees looking for help with a specific problem, such as a job search or a project.
Again, in times that are changing and that are requiring a certain sense of leadership in every, being a mentor to others can be the missing steppingstone that people need. And in that way, the ecosystem is getting progressed in a close circle: With people becoming mentees, mentees becoming professionals, and professionals becoming mentors.
