What is Mentorship and its Importance

 Mentorshipis a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person.
The mentor may be older or younger, but have a certain area of expertise. It is a learning and development partnership between someone with vast experience and someone who wants to learn.^[1]
The person in receipt of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female), an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee.
"Mentoring" is a process that always involves communication and is relationship based, but its precise definition is elusive. One definition of the many that have been proposed, is
Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé)".

Mentoring techniques

The focus of mentoring is to develop the whole person and so the techniques are broad and require wisdom in order to be used appropriately.^[7]
A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business^[8] found that the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:

1. Accompanying: making a commitment in a caring way, which involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
2. Sowing: mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the situation requires it.
3. Catalyzing: when change reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
4. Showing: this is making something understandable, or using your own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by your own behavior.
5. Harvesting: here the mentor focuses on "picking the ripe fruit": it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are: "What have you learned?", "How useful is it?".

Different techniques may be used by mentors according to the situation and the mindset of the mentee, and the techniques used in modern organizations can be found in ancient education systems, from the Socratic technique of harvesting to the accompaniment method of learning used in the apprenticeship of itinerant cathedral builders during the Middle Ages.^[8] Leadership authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner^[9] advise mentors to look for "teachable moments" in order to "expand or realize the potentialities of the people in the organizations they lead" and underline that personal credibility is as essential to quality mentoring as skill.

Benefits

Especially in the workplace, there are many benefits to developing a mentorship program for new, and current employees.
Career Development: Mentoring employees gives the opportunity to align organizational goals to personal career goals. It gives employees the ability to advance professionally. This collaboration gives employees a feeling of engagement, which leads to better retention rates.
High Potential Mentoring: Top talent in the workplace tend to be difficult to retain. These employees have incredible potential to make great things happen for the company, and for themselves. With a mentor program, top talent employees can be guided into leadership positions, and give them new engagement for new roles that will attract them to stay longer.
Diversity Mentoring: One of the top ways to innovate is by bringing in new ideas. Mentors can empower diverse employees to share ideas, knowledge, experience to expand and innovate into the company. This also brings cultural awareness and a value of other cultures into the workplace.
Reverse Mentoring: This not so obvious benefit of mentoring is incredibly important. The younger generations can help the older generations to expand and grow towards current trends. Everyone has something to bring to the table, this creates a two way street within companies where younger employees can see the larger picture, and senior employees can see things from a different point of view.
Knowledge Transfer Mentoring: Employees must have a certain set of skills in order to accomplish the tasks at hand. Mentoring is a great approach to help employees get organized, and give them access to an expert that can give feedback, and help answer questions that they may not know where to find answers to. ^[13]
Mentorship provides critical benefits to individuals as well as organizations. Although the importance of mentorship to an individual’s career advancement is virtually universal, in the United States it historically has been most apparent in relation to the advancement of women and minorities in the workplace—because, until recent decades, American men in dominant ethnic groups had reaped the benefits of mentorship without consciously identifying it as an advancement strategy in the modern sense. American women and minorities, in contrast, more pointedly identified and pursued mentorship in the second half of the twentieth century as they sought to achieve the professional success they had long been denied.^[4]
In a 1958 study, Margaret Cussler showed that, for each female executive she interviewed who did not own her own company, “something—or someone—gave her a push up the ladder while others halted on a lower rung.” Cussler concluded that the relationship between the “sponsor and protégé” (the vocabulary of “mentorship” was not yet in common use) was the “magic formula” for success.^[14] By the late 1970s, numerous publications had established the centrality of mentorship to business success for everyone and particularly for women trying to break into the male-dominated business world. These publications noted the many specific benefits provided by mentorship, which included insider information, education, guidance, moral support, inspiration, sponsorship, an example to follow, protection, promotion, the ability to “bypass the hierarchy,” the projection of the superior’s “reflected power,” access to otherwise invisible opportunities, and tutelage in corporate politics.^[4]
This literature also showed the value of these benefits. A Harvard Business Review survey of 1,250 top executives published in 1979, for example, showed that most had been mentored or sponsored and that those who received such assistance reported higher income, a better education, a quicker path to achievement, and more job satisfaction than those who did not.^[15] The literature particularly emphasized the necessity of mentoring for businesswomen’s success.^[4] For example, although women made up less than one percent of the executives in the Harvard Business Review survey, all of these women reported being mentored.^[15] In subsequent decades, as mentoring became a widely valued phenomenon in the United States, women and minorities in particular continued to develop mentoring relationships consciously as they sought professional advancement.