What makes a great company stand out from the rest?
While there are many ways to answer this question, one thing we’ve seen at Torch is that organizations with a strong presence of leadership mentoring, or the practice of having senior executives mentor more junior employees, tend to perform well.
But to get your leadership team interested in mentoring others, they have to understand the benefits. We’ll use this blog post to review 10 of the upsides of leadership mentoring.
10 reasons leaders should mentor others
1. Leads to positive business outcomes
Leadership mentoring isn’t just for the benefit of employees – it can help your company achieve business goals as well. 87% of Millennials rate professional career growth and developmental opportunities as important to them in a job. Given this, mentoring can help attract high-quality candidates into your talent pipeline. It’s also a great way to nurture the high potential employees that are already at your organization.
Leadership mentoring has also been shown to improve retention rates and job satisfaction. 91% of individuals who have a mentor being satisfied with their job, and managers are less likely to leave their organizations when their needs for formal development through training, mentoring, and coaching are being met.
2. Creates feelings of personal fulfillment
While leadership mentoring is primarily for the benefit of the mentees, the mentors can gain a lot from the experience as well. By giving back to the people in their organization, leaders who choose to mentor others can discover a lot of personal fulfillment through their contributions. They may also find it rewarding to see the employees they mentor succeed in their careers.
3. Encourages continuous learning
Mentoring can create continuous learning opportunities that go both ways. Mentees are constantly learning new knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking from their mentor. Mentors can also gain valuable insights from their mentees that help them in their day-to-day interactions, decision-making, and responsibilities as a team leader. This type of relationship is mutually beneficial and ensures that the company continues to innovate and grow.
4. Establishes strong relationships
Mentoring is a great opportunity to establish new relationships. When approached thoughtfully, both mentors and mentees can get matched up to people they otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed to at the organization. The benefits of these new relationships are that they:
- Create a network and support system for mentees
- Expose mentors to individuals of different backgrounds, interests, and personalities
- Strengthen company culture by encouraging collaboration
5. Improves job proficiency
Mentoring has been found to help mentees get better at their jobs, faster. In fact, 92% of Torch mentees report increased skills for the job. This is great for mentees since they can demonstrate their value to the rest of their team. But it’s also great for organizations since it means their employees are being productive and delivering the maximum impact through their work.
6. Increases professional credibility
When mentors share their expertise with others, it can elevate their credibility within the organization. Why? It demonstrates confidence in their abilities, indicates strong leadership because of their willingness to nurture others, and builds trust because of their investment in the success of other employees.
7. Builds soft skills
Mentorship often requires mentors to put themselves in their mentees’ shoes. This can help them build empathy, compassion, and open-mindedness. These types of soft skills are critical for leaders to nurture when it comes to building trust with employees.
Given that only one in three employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization, this should be a priority for all organizations – especially since employees who trust their leadership are twice as likely to say they will be with their company one year from now.
8. Develops self-awareness
The mentor-mentee relationship can spark self-reflection on both sides, which will ultimately lead to improved self-awareness. This type of understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses can have a huge impact on the day-to-day work that both mentors and mentees do. Specifically, self-awareness can help mentors and mentees:
- Build better relationships with colleagues
- Develop in a productive way by targeting their areas for improvement
- Make valuable contributions that play to their strengths
9. Boosts coaching skills
Coaching is a skill that’s critical to leadership. 80% of the workforce who have experienced coaching say it positively impacts their work performance, productivity, communication skills, and well-being.
But coaching isn’t a skill that comes naturally to most people and must be learned and developed. Since a large component of mentorship is coaching, leaders can work on building this muscle and bring their newfound coaching skills to all of their workplace relationships.
10. Produces better leaders
The practice of mentoring, thanks to all the benefits we listed above, shapes better leaders.
Not only does being a mentor benefit the mentee, but it can also help leaders be more effective in their own jobs – whether that’s by building more empathy, providing more insight into the day-to-day of their employees, or practicing critical skills like coaching and giving feedback.
Now that you know many of the benefits that come with leadership mentoring, you can encourage the executives at your organization to sign up for your mentoring program today. To learn more about Torch’s mentoring platform, request a demo.
