Mentorship refers to patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor.
A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.
A mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee.
Most mentorships involve having senior staff mentor more junior mentees.
A mentor is a senior or more experienced person who is assigned to function as an advisor, counsellor, or guide to a junior or trainee.
The mentor is responsible for offering help and feedback to the person under their supervision.
A mentor’s role is to use their experience to help a junior employee by supporting them in their work and career, offering direction to mentees as they work through circumstances at work.
The interaction with an expert may allow one to gain proficiency with cultural tools.
Mentorship experience and relationship defines the amount of psychosocial support, career guidance, role modeling and communication that occurs in the relationships in which the protégés and mentors engaged.
Mentoring is a process that always involves communication and is relationship-based: its definition is elusive, as there are more than 50 definitions currently in use.
Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development.
Mentoring involves informal communication, usually face-to-face during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience and a person who is perceived to have less.
The five most commonly used techniques among mentors are:
Accompanying: the mentor participates in the learning process alongside the learner and supports them.
Sowing: the mentor gives initially unclear or unacceptable advice to the learner that has value in a given situation.
Catalyzing: the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change to provoke a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
Showing: the mentor teaches the learner by demonstrating a skill or activity.
Harvesting: the mentor assesses and defines the utility and value of the learner’s skills.
Different techniques are used by mentors according to the situation and the mindset of the mentee.
Having more than one mentor can expand the learner’s knowledge, as different mentors may have different strengths.
Some mentorship programs provide both social and vocational support.
Formal mentoring programs have goals, schedules, and training for both mentors and protégés and evaluations.
Informal mentoring occurs without the use of structured recruitment, and can develop naturally between partners, such as business networking situations where a more experienced individual meets a new employee and the two build a rapport.
Mentoring takes a dyadic structure in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.
Mentorship models:
Cloning model: The mentor teaches the learner as if they were a clone of the mentor.
Nurturing model: The mentor assumes a parental role to create an open, supportive environment where the learner can learn and try things themselves.
Friendship model: The mentor acts more as a peer rather than being involved in a hierarchical relationship
Apprenticeship model: The mentor and learner predominantly have a professional relationship.
Peer mentoring involves individuals in similar positions.
Situational mentoring refers to short-term relationships in which a person mentors for a specific purpose.
Supervisory mentoring involves a mentor with a higher position than the learner.
Mentoring circles: Participants from all levels of the organization propose and own a topic before meeting in groups to discuss the topic, which motivates them to grow and become more knowledgeable.
Flash mentoring is ideal for situations like job shadowing and reverse mentoring, and is a short-term form of mentoring that focuses on single meetings rather than a traditional, long-term mentoring relationship.
Mentoring has significant behavioral, attitudinal, health-related, relational, motivational, and career benefits.
Benefits depend on context with functions that belong under two major factors: psychosocial support-role modeling, friendship, emotional support, encouragement and career-related support-advice, goals.
A career development mentoring program enables an organization to help junior employees to learn the skills and behaviors from senior employees that the junior employees need to advance to higher-responsibility positions.
Mentoring program can help to align organizational goals with employees’ personal career goals of progressing within the organization.
Such collaboration provides a feeling of engagement with the organization, which can lead to better retention rates and increased employee satisfaction.
Mentoring program for high-potential employees that gives them one-helps engage employees, give them the opportunity to develop, and increase the likelihood of staying in the organization.
Diversity mentoring helps developing employees from diverse groups can give the organization access to new ideas, problem-solving approaches, and perspectives.
Mentor relationships tend to lead to success within the organization and increased job satisfaction.
A majority mentor, by virtue of their status, can assist a minority learner in receiving the recognition and job advancement they deserve.
Minority mentors work harder than other mentors to prove their worth wwhen paired with majority learners, their perceived worth automatically increases due solely to the majority status of their peers.
Minority mentors tend to impart emotional benefits to their learners.
Mentorship is important in business success for everyone and particularly for women trying to enter the male-dominated business world.
Many benefits provided by mentorship: insider information, education, guidance, moral support, inspiration, sponsorship, protection, promotion, the ability to bypass the hierarchy, projection of the superior’s power, access to otherwise invisible opportunities, and tutelage in corporate politics.
Most employees that have been mentored or sponsored and who received such assistance report higher incomes, better education, quicker paths to achievement, and more job satisfaction than those who did not.
Studies suggest mentoring is important for businesswomen’s success
Mentoring has become a widely valued phenomenon in the United States, as women and minorities in particular continued to develop mentoring relationships as they seek professional advancement.
Mentoring typically involves a more experienced, typically older employee or leader providing guidance to a younger employee, the opposite approach can also be used.
With the rise of digital innovations, Internet applications, and social media in the 2000s, new, younger employees may be more familiar with these technologies than senior employees in organizations.
Mentoring has been linked to improved job performance, and intrinsic job satisfaction and career satisfaction.
Mentoring diminishes the negative association between unfavourable working circumstances and positive job outcomes.
Mentoring decreases characteristics of burnout-emotional weariness, depersonalization, and decreased personal accomplishment.
Monitors open doors, protects, sponsors and leads.
Mentoring may really contribute to better degrees of emotional and lasting commitment to an organization.
New employees who are paired with a mentor are twice as likely to remain in their job than those who do not receive mentorship.
Mentoring relationships promote career growth and benefit both the mentor and the learner.
A mentor can show leadership by teaching, and the organization receives an employee that is shaped by the organization’s culture and operation because they have been under the mentorship of an experienced member; and the learner can network, integrate easier into the organization, and acquire experience and advice.
Mentoring in education can involve a relationship between two people where the mentor plays a supportive and advisory role for the student, the learner.
Mentorship is crucial to high-quality education because it promotes individual development and growth while also ensuring the passage of skills and professional standards to the next generation.
In many schools, mentorship programs are offered to support students in program completion, confidence building, and transitioning to further education or the workforce.