Mentoring
Flattening the Learning Curve
“Pres, you have meant so much to me.
I love the things I learn from you and just wanted you to know that”
Mentoring flattens the learning curves of personal and professional development.
Instruction is necessary, but nothing advances growth like having a partner for the journey. Mentoring is guidance, demonstration, and relationship laced together over time.
In addition, there are valuable byproducts to mentoring: corporate loyalty, understanding with greater nuance, and stability.
In a word, mentoring helps people feel secure, and secure people are much more apt to contribute than insecure people who tend to prioritize shoring up their own position, even at the expense of others.
Mentoring promotes communication, increases the success potential of teams, and eases the doubt, fear, and inwardness that create bureaucracy at the expense of efficiency.
Coaching is good, and appropriate in the right circumstance, but mentoring is like having a personal guide.
I can assist:
■ Conceptualize and develop a mentoring program
■ Clarify what is worthy of transfer via mentoring
■ Build measurable goals for a mentoring program
■ Engage in the personal trust of a mentoring relationship with key individuals
■ Cast a vision for how mentoring becomes part of corporate culture
■ Ensure that the priority of mentoring carries forward to the next generation
Mentoring is not usually linear,
but it is effective.
The outcome is soft in that it can’t always be reflected on the bottom line, but the testimony of a mentored person is one of the most rewarding outcomes in life and business. If valued and implemented, mentoring builds human capital, and human capital creates healthy bottom lines.
Years ago, I vowed to not embark upon a project, journey of heart, or labor in my soul without taking someone along for the adventure.
