In this video, I talk about why you should consider creating a mentoring culture in your business and how you can go about doing that.
Do you really need a mentor for your team? Do you need to mentor your team? Isn’t operating a business making you busy enough as it is? Why do you need to mentor your team?
Why is a mentoring culture important?
You should consider mentoring for two important reasons.
- Your team is your most valuable asset.
- Mentoring promotes loyalty and productivity.
Career growth and development are important to employees—just as business growth and development is important to business owners, as discussed in my video why employees leave. Mentoring is one way of providing training and knowledge transfer.
A study on the mentoring program initiated and instituted in Sun Microsystems showed that mentoring benefitted both the mentor and the mentee, indicating that it is beneficial for everyone in the entire organisation.
What is a mentoring culture?
Put simply, a mentoring culture is essentially a helping culture. If someone is new on the team or someone is having difficulty, everyone who can find a way to help a team member out through mentoring.
How do you create opportunities for mentorship on a daily basis?
- Model behavior you want to see.
It starts from the top—it starts with you, the business owner. Start with how you want people to behave. When they see it done from the top and they themselves become mentees, they have a better idea of what mentoring means and are more likely to emulate such behavior.
What is important is that you ensure that you’re demonstrating positive, respectful, and solution-oriented approaches.
- Know when to manage and when to coach.
There’s a time to manage and a time to coach—and they’re two different things.
Managing entails executing strategies and driving performance and making executive decisions. Coaching, on the other hand, involves teaching and motivating. While managing focuses on performance and results of an organisation, coaching involves close and sometimes personal engagement, as this requires understanding, among other things, challenges that mentees face.
You need to show that you are concerned with the well-being of individuals within your team.
- Expect and embrace culture.
You can’t teach someone and expect them to get it the first time. Mentoring and coaching involve a trial and error approach—people learn both from their successes and mistakes. But this also means that you can’t expect mentees to be successful all the time—they need some leeway to learn and fail.
What to do if I don’t know how to teach?
Find a mentor yourself! Find someone who can teach you and help you in your business. Anyone with the right experience can be a mentor—there are just varying styles on how one coaches and teaches. You just need to find someone who is willing to work with you and with whom you are comfortable to work with.
Besides, mentors don’t know everything—but they possess the experience to guide you, to make you think strategically, and to help you improve so that you can pass on that knowledge to members of your team.
If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.
