Warning! Mentoring Can Be Detrimental to Your Business

Introduction

Professional and personal environments foster an environment ripe for the opportunity to mentor others. Mentoring occurs both in obvious and subtle ways, sometimes without doing so intentionally. Mentoring can be a positive and productive experience when executed correctly, and it can have disastrous consequences if not, the repercussions of which can ruin relationships and be costly to businesses.

What is Mentoring?

Mentoring refers to a personal or professional developmental relationship wherein a more experienced or more knowledgeable person (mentor) helps a less experienced or knowledgeable person (mentee) to develop personally, do a job more effectively or help the mentee work towards their career goals.

Commonly a mentor is someone whom as attained a high level of recognized experience in a particular domain, such as a parent, family member, friend or a adult role model, a manager, executive or other business organizational leader, and sometimes, it is a person most would not recognize as having the ability to be a mentor. Mentoring can be done by any person with experience, maturity, knowledge and leadership skills and qualities generally attributed to the role.

What are the qualities of a mentor?

The qualities of a mentor are synonymous in many ways with those we associate with leadership both in social and business communities.

Some of the qualities common to all mentors are they have integrity, are of good character, make decisions, are self-disciplined, selfless, fair, have good communication skills, routinely help others reach their potential by empowering them, admit that they make their own mistakes, and have a driven passion to make a difference. There are many other qualities and characteristics that comprise the makeup of a mentor, but it is unique to each individual, vast and varied and would go on indefinitely.

Professional Mentoring in Business

Mentoring in a business environment can be defined by many mentor-mentee roles in the organizational structure. Most commonly, it is an employee-manager, employee-executive type role, although in many instances, it is a new employee-established employee defined relationship.

In some businesses, certain staff have been identified to have mentoring capabilities and are either encouraged by the higher-ups or directly assigned to mentor other individuals in the organization. More commonly it has been found, mentoring is a process that occurs naturally as a result of interactions between the two individuals. The mentor, having the natural quality of desiring to help others learn and succeed has a tendency to be drawn into the role of being a mentor by interacting with someone that exhibits the desire and aptitude to learn and grow, as often is the case with new hires or promoted employees.