"A mentor empowers a person to see a possible future and believe it can be obtained." – Shawn Hitchcock.
Mentorship isn't a fancy designation; it is a choice. For someone who wishes to be a mentor, the choice is to bring a change in the life of someone. For a trainee, the option is to become a better version of themselves. Mentorship relies on the principle of sharing experiences, knowledge, and wisdom. There may not be formal mentorship programs in many organizations, but mentorship is being given its long due importance. In our daily life of personal and professional juggle, mentorship is a powerful concept that helps build a bright future by making changes from within.
There are different types of mentorship that an organization establishes; group mentorship is one of the important ones. Group mentorship implies there is one mentor to many trainees. The trainees may have a similar motivation or match with the mentor for similar traits and attitudes. Group Mentorship tends to work together with many people, thereby filling any gap of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The article below will give the benefits of mentorship.
Benefits of Mentorship
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Drives Employees To Achieve Organization's Goals
Good mentors help individuals track their performances by motivating them regularly, and they imbibe the organization's objectives after matching those to the individual goals of trainees. With all the tracking, employees feel more engaged in their jobs and contribute better quality and quantity. Employees rarely leave such jobs where they are constantly guided and encouraged to advance their careers. It also gives them a sense of belonging and makes them more responsible towards their duties.
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Helps Employees Grow Their Network
Group Mentorship involves many trainees to one mentor. In such cases, during sessions or events, employees get to expand their inter-departmental networks and build connections. This connection might grow into personal space beyond the professional zone as the employees from different departments with different aspirations could inspire. Hence this way, mentorship can bridge the gap and fuel diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the workplace.
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Profits Underrepresented Groups By Sharing Information
In an organization, many underrepresented groups may not have the privilege of getting all the information. For example, women, people with disabilities, or of different ethnicity may not get all the first-hand information. With the group mentoring initiatives, every mentee gets all that barred information, thereby making a transition reflecting equity. The mentoring programs work with new talent pools to get more recent perspectives and bridge the earlier knowledge gap in that underrepresented community.
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Grows Companies By Tracking Exceptional Talent
Mentorship works effectively only through interaction, as in one-to-one or one to many. It focuses on pushing the employee to grow in their careers, matches their goals with the organization's mission, and drives them. Today mentorship has expanded its branch to virtual space and its effect in the workplace. You can interact with your mentor and attend the mentoring sessions online or through video conferences. By exercising the process of inclusion, mentorship fuels leadership produces exceptional talent.
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Enhances Mentor-Mentee Relationship Through Active Mentorship
Active mentorship is when the mentor listens with all their attention, helps the mentee with a plan, and watches them execute it. Mentors give their employees a sense of belonging and prove they care through their availability. Not only that, a mentor is known to many, and they help trainees grow their professional and personal networks by leveraging talents.
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Inflicts the Company Culture within the Trainees
One of the factors of mentorship that fuels diversity, equity, and inclusion within an organization is imbibing the company culture within the trainees. Through effective communication skills, mentors help trainees understand how they can work towards a common goal. So along with individual growth, they focus on teamwork and group productivity. It prepares them to walk together with diverse people having a sense of equity and inclusivity.
Mentorship is a challenge for the mentors but a blessing for the organization. By taking the responsibility to motivate employees and recruits, mentors help organizations spend less on training costs. Employees who are regular to the leader mentoring programs, events, and seminars find themselves driven to the purpose. They even take the initiatives to approach seniors and learn job techniques to prove their worth to the company. Working together itself fuels diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A Challenging Endeavour
Mentorship is an intense, challenging responsibility that is neither defined nor comes easily to someone. A mentor necessarily has to put all the effort to understand their trainee, delve deeper into their problems, and work out possibilities as solutions. Through mentorship programs, a mentor can prepare to face the hardships, but only through interacting sessions with trainees can they impact.
Any organization has structure, policies, and principles, but it all gets tangled in the formal procedure. It lacks human intervention, and mentorship is the ultimate way to do it. Though underrated, mentorship helps people contribute significantly, builds excellent relationships, thereby fuelling diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the workplace and outside it.
Shellye is committed to helping people from diverse backgrounds to achieve their aspirations in careers and life. The content published above was made in collaboration with our members.
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