You’ve heard about Mentoring, and don’t understand what all of the hype is about – it’s just another way to say “have a conversation with people who know stuff you don’t” right? On the surface that may be all there is to it, but the power of mentoring goes a lot farther than those meetings may seem to indicate, and a successful mentoring relationship can often lead to decades of collaboration.

The Benefits

Mentoring has a lot of benefits, and not just to the person who is looking for a mentor (called the protege or “mentee”). A few of the benefits include:

• Better engagement
• More job satisfaction
• Higher retention (less employee turnover) for both partners in the mentoring relationship
• Faster promotions
• Facilitated learning – for both parties
• Better succession planning
• Higher overall knowledge base for the business
• Staff that are more skilled, more engaged and better at working together.

Most of these benefits are difficult to quantify, so many of the companies that specialize in supporting mentorship programs tend to focus on retention. Continue reading The Power of Mentorship →