Whether you’re seasoned in your field or just out of college, a mentor can help you grow in your career. Mentorship is also a useful resource for employees just starting out at a new job or in a new role; a mentor can help them quickly learn what they need to know to succeed. An overall career mentor can help an employee develop skills, take on more challenging roles and responsibilities, and generally, guide the progress of an employee’s career. This individual may work in the employee’s organization or, more likely, the relationship may have developed several companies ago or from a professional association relationship.
A Mentor Is a Sounding Board, Sometimes an Evaluator
A mentor can also serve as a sounding board as the new employee is assimilated into the company. The mentor can help the continuing employee become more knowledgeable and effective in their current job. They help continuing employees reach new levels of knowledge, sophistication, and career development. The best mentoring relationships involve the exchange of a particular body of knowledge that helps the new employee quickly come up to speed as a contributor within your organization. The mentoring relationship can also be evaluative in nature to assess the assimilation of the new employee in their new role. Mentoring is provided in addition to your new employee onboarding process and should have different content and goals.
New Employee Mentors in Onboarding
Many organizations assign a mentor as part of their formal employee onboarding process. Other mentoring relationships develop spontaneously and over time. All mentoring relationships are encouraged as research indicates that employees who experience mentoring are retained, learn more quickly, and assimilate into the company culture more effectively. A 2015 Harvard Business Review article reported that mentors help professionals, particularly those at more junior levels, advance more quickly, earn better salaries, and find satisfaction in their jobs. “For employers, the benefits are not only higher performance but also greater success in attracting, developing, and retaining talent,” Suzanne de Janasz and Maury Peiperl wrote in the article.
Mentoring by Immediate Managers
A mentoring relationship frequently occurs between an employee and their immediate manager; in fact, this was the normal mentoring relationship in the past. These mentoring relationships are still encouraged, but it is recommended that employees and organizations pursue additional mentoring relationships. A mentoring relationship with an immediate manager or supervisor never loses the evaluation aspects necessary for the employee to succeed within your organization including decisions about pay and promotions. Mentoring is a skill and an art that can be developed over time through training and participation.
The Mentoring Buddy
In many organizations, an employee, sometimes called a buddy, is assigned to a new employee for new employee orientation and onboarding. The buddy performs a role that is like the mentor’s, but the buddy is usually a coworker and/or a more experienced peer of the new employee. The mentoring buddy is expected to do everything that they can to assist the new employee to become fully knowledgeable about and integrated into the organization. The buddy relationship can last a long time, and the employees may even become friends. Often working in the same or a similar job in the organization, the buddy plays a special role in helping the new employee become comfortable with the actual job by training them. The buddy is also responsible for introducing the new employee to others in the organization. A buddy in conjunction with an effective new employee orientation will bring an organization a successful new employee.
Seeking Out Additional Mentors
Additional relationships with a mentor can develop spontaneously and over time. Or, an employee can seek out a mentor because they want to experience the power of a mentoring relationship in his or her career growth. These unassigned mentors are often more experienced employees or managers who can offer the mentee (employee receiving mentoring) additional information that the employee wants or needs. For example, a product team member seeks out a mentoring relationship with the manager of the marketing department. They hope to learn how to understand markets and customers better before the team develops a product that no one wants to buy. This type of sought-out mentoring relationship can foster much success in an organization.
Mentoring Relationships Are Powerful
Another instance in which a mentoring relationship is powerful occurs when an employee identifies career skills that they lack. The employee then seeks out an individual in the organization who exhibits these skills and identifies that the employee is someone from whom the employee seeking a mentor believes they can learn the skills. These relationships generally form when an employee reaches out to a more experienced colleague. Or, they develop professionally over time through a relationship developed through such activities as an active professional association membership.
