IS YOUR PROFESIONAL CAREER PROGRESSING ON THE RIGHT TRACK?
“Leaders should be alert and ponder on their career progress before the no turning point occurs” ~ Ivett Casanova.
Mentoring is one of the efficient organizational processes for professional development, because it addresses knowledge conveyance transfer inside the organization in a well-structured pattern and it also upholds new experiences to increase and strengths new skills and competencies.
According to Harvard Business Review article, Why Your Mentorship Program Isn’t Working (2020), “people who have strong mentors accrue a host of professional benefits, including more rapid advancement, higher salaries, greater organizational commitment, stronger identity, and higher satisfaction with both job and career. They also see personal benefits, such as better physical health and self-esteem, ease of work-life integration, and stronger relational skills”.
Unfortunately, there are also many cases where the mentoring programs have been unsuccessful and not very effective.
During mu years of leading Human Resources teams I have witnessed both types, successful mentoring programs and those which have failed.
In order to have a successful mentoring programs, organizations should focus on the followings attributes: middle term talent management strategies; their culture, as it refers to development and accountability, the level of employee commitment; last but not least, the level of skills, experience and wisdom the management team has in order to develop others. I refer again to the Why Your Mentoring Programs Isn’t Working (2020), HBR article “that too often program leaders erroneously assume that any successful manager can mentor effectively, with minimal (if any) training, and that the art of mentoring is innate or easy to acquire. Since so many never had mentors themselves, they lack mental maps for how it is done well. Evidence indicates that poor mentoring can be worse for employees than no mentoring at all”.
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This is why it is very relevant to the implementation of any mentoring program, to first have a well trained and developed managers. Not only is it important for the Mentor be the technical expert in their respective trade, but also needs to have a well developed and keen ability to listen, to provide appropriate feedback and to give guidance. Ultimately, managers need to show their service advocacy, because this is what mentoring is all about, to put themselves at their mentees’ service.
With such a wide variety of career development tools, mentoring could be considered one of the most effective to yield short to medium term visible results. Whether the person invest in mentoring inside their organization or with an external mentor, self-motivation and discipline are paramount for a successful development process. In the end, all depends on you!
