They'll quickly understand the professional challenges you'll face and it's very possible that they'll have first-hand experience with the same type of obstacles. They're also in the ideal position to help you determine what are the most important skills to get you where you want to go and how you can develop them. A mentor will support you, encourage you, provide feedback, advice, and help you define and achieve your goals. It can be a key relationship in your life and one that has the potential to affect your choices and career path in a significant way.
While peer mentoring is fairly common in the workplace, a prototypical mentor is often a trusted advisor with more experience than the mentee. As such, most mentors will have already achieved much of the success that their mentors are looking for. Therefore, a mentor is in the perfect position to provide you with real vision of how to help you achieve your goals. By sharing their own experiences, they will ultimately be able to prevent you from making costly mistakes and will ultimately accelerate your ability to advance your profession.
Leaders with this mentality misunderstand the role of mentoring, a relationship that is completely different from the relationships that people have with their managers. For that reason, it's important to separate the two and understand the difference between mentoring and coaching. These conversations with your mentor aren't brutally honest or painful. Rather, they seek to shed light on new opportunities and overcome challenges in a way that invites you to act.
At the beginning of your career, it's certainly a good idea to find a mentor to help you through these formative years. With the support of a mentor, trainees can focus on their career, gain confidence, achieve goals and expand their networks. If your mentor doesn't have experience with a particular problem you're facing, they'll most likely be able to talk to someone who does. By defining goals and creating smaller steps to achieve them, mentors help mentors focus on what they need to do to advance their careers.
They can also give you suggestions that could help you refine your ideas and provide you with more efficient or effective ways to achieve the desired business results; mentors can often prevent you from unnecessarily “reinventing the wheel”. The relationship between you and your mentor is based on honest self-evaluation and valuable guidance. Alternatively, if your company has a workplace mentoring program, it simplifies the process and connects you with people who want to make a difference in their lives. The information that a mentor can provide will help you negotiate the biggest salary increase and the best possible benefit package.
A mentor will be able to offer honest feedback related to your performance, which will highlight the areas in which you excel and those in need of improvement. Start thinking now about the specific ways you want a mentor to help you and make a list of people who might be able to help you. Mentors can guide a mentee by providing instructions on how to perform specific tasks or acquire useful skills.
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