Mentorship: The Unseen Pillar of Strong Leadership

Mentoring less experienced or new colleagues is an excellent leadership strategy that will improve your team’s results. It helps your employees grow in skills, decision-making, and confidence, simply making them better at what they do. How to embrace mentorship in leadership? Define your goals, pair the right people up, provide feedback, and build a culture of learning. Let’s discuss this in more detail.

What Benefits Come with Embracing Mentorship in Your Leadership?

Whether remote leadership or a traditional one, you need to become a mentor for your colleagues, as this comes with a plethora of advantages. From increasing your team’s efficiency to making your employees happier and more satisfied with their jobs. What are the benefits in particular? Take a look below.

Better Business Results

Colleague mentorship is exceptionally beneficial when it comes to improving the results of your team or whole company. By providing feedback, encouraging learning from each other, answering questions, or even helping with certain tasks, your employees gain new skills and improve the ones they already have. As a result, they become more productive, and you can rely on them to deliver high-quality services/products/ideas – all of that translates into a higher income generated by your team.

Happier Employees

With mentoring, your colleagues gain confidence and proficiency. This makes the work less stressful for them, improving their well-being and overall satisfaction with the job.

What are the results of it? Lower employee turnover and higher employee engagement. It also helps you prevent your colleagues from burning out!

Stimulating Self-Learning

Mentorship leadership also incentivizes your employees to self-study. Seeing how they can exchange their knowledge and the sources they learn from will drive your employees to seek more information and acquire new skills on their own.

Improved Collaboration

Finally, mentoring brings your team members together. It helps build relationships and create an atmosphere where your employees are not afraid to ask questions – and it’s always better to ask than make a mistake.

Additionally, mentoring will help you collaborate with your team when transitioning from team member to team manager, as it will show that you are still the same person, but in a different role.

How to Become a Mentor for Your Colleagues and Introduce Mentorship in Your Team

Knowing the benefits of mentorship leadership, we need to discuss how to put it into life. While there is no one universal way – it all depends on your team dynamics and the type of work you do – we prepared a few tips to help you become a mentor to your less experienced colleagues and incentivize them to mentor each other.

Define Your Goals

Do you want the mentorship program to help your colleagues gain new skills? Improve the quality of their work? Or maybe make them do their tasks faster? You need to define what you want to achieve if you want your mentoring to be effective.

Choose a Mentoring Style

There are several types of mentoring that you can adopt, depending on your goals and needs. You have to select which one you want to follow. What are they in particular?

• High-potential mentoring – In this type, you match a high-potential employee with you, the manager, or your senior team member. The former shares their fresh ideas, while the latter teaches them all about the ins and outs of the industry or your company procedures.
• Reverse mentoring – As the name suggests, in reverse mentoring, it’s the junior colleague who mentors you, telling you about trends like diversity or the ways they handle certain situations or processes at the lower level.
• Group mentoring – In this scenario, you select one mentor for several employees.

Think Who You Pair with Whom

The key to effective mentorship in leadership is to select the right people for each mentor-mentee pair. Think about the best qualities in both and make your decision based on it.

You don’t want to match two people who excel at the same tasks; instead, you want to build pairs in which your team members will complement each other and help cover the gaps or improve their weaknesses.

Provide Feedback

Mentoring without feedback is pointless. Make sure that you and the other mentors provide feedback to the mentees.

You should also evaluate the pairs/groups and provide feedback on what progress they made due to mentoring. This way, you’ll increase motivation and build up the feeling of development.

Create a Culture of Learning

Mentoring new or less experienced colleagues should be an incentive to pursue self-development. Thus, you need to let your employees know that they can ask questions, that the knowledge they gain on your own is appreciated, and that their voices are heard. This way, you’ll make mentorship even more effective and drive your whole team towards better results.

The Takeaway

Good mentorship is a critical part of leadership. It’s a way to build a motivated, skilled team that is truly engaged and dedicated to achieving success. Therefore, you shouldn’t overlook it – follow our tips and embrace mentoring in your company as soon as possible.

You might also read: How Mentorship Advanced My Career