MENTORS – MORE THAN ONE
- Mar 6
- 3 min read
By Doug Lawrence
I remember when I first started my business back in late early 2000 and it was a bit overwhelming. There was so much to be concerned about and so much that I thought had to be done.
What I very quickly learned was that I couldn’t do it all by myself, especially the things that I had limited if any knowledge in.
The solution – I didn’t need just one mentor I needed one for each area. I developed a mentor advisory group. I had someone who was very strong in business, someone strong in finance, someone in technology and someone in human resources/people management.
I would bring this group together once a month or more often if need be and seek their wisdom and guidance to address some of the issues that I was facing. We would meet over a lunch hour and I would leave with some answers but more than likely a list of things I had to work on for our next meeting.
I would occasionally meet with them on an individual basis so that I didn’t have to take up so much of their time when my questions were about things that were not relevant to their area of expertise. When I reflect back, one thing missing at that time point was to have had a female business person on the mentor advisory group.
They would have brought yet another perspective to the discussion. The research I have done goes way back to when I first started my organization and identified the market need for mentoring and more importantly for mentoring for women in a leadership capacity/role.
63% of women never had a mentor
56%of organizations have a formal mentoring program in place.
Mentoring has been identified as a solution to organizational challenges such as absenteeism, high turn over rates, mental health, disengagement, to name but a few. These are all things that women in leadership roles face and must provide the leadership to navigate out of those turbulent times.
In a conversation I had with a HR practitioner the other day we still are not at a place where we can handle some of these issues and tend to bury our heads in the sand as it is easier to ignore rather than deal with challenges such as this. This is no different – male or female leader. This stresses the need all that much more for strong female leaders to be in positions of leadership.
Strong female leaders who understand and embrace the gift of mentoring. Strong female leaders who see this as a learning opportunity. Strong female leaders who share their knowledge with other female leaders for their betterment and for the betterment of others.
If we want to take a picture of what leadership looks like in todays work environment all we need to do is look at the role of most female leaders. They have not one role by have a triple role to manage/balance. They provide elder support for aging family members, they sometimes are working remotely – by choice or as decreed by their workplace and they have children to look after. Looking after children is a full-time job in most cases.
In most mentoring relationships, it is not subject matter and technical expertise with which mentees struggle. It’s the core leadership skills like influencing, working through problems, negotiation, and interpersonal skills with which less-experienced professionals most often need help.
Important note to potential mentors: Do not be reluctant to take on mentorships because of a lack of subject matter expertise.
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