Significant life changes, like starting a new job or making a career change, can feel daunting and lonely. Everything is new. You’re surrounded by strangers. And there are endless unspoken rules that everyone else knows and navigates with ease.
Luckily, there’s one person that can help you find your footing quickly: a mentor. If you can find a mentor in your new role, you might perform better, feel more satisfied, and stay longer at the company.
And it’s a win-win situation: the benefits of mentorship also extend to the more senior partner, who can use the relationship as a forum to develop their leadership skills and reinvigorate their own careers.
What’s a mentor?
The word “mentor” comes from the ancient Greek epic “The Odyssey.” In the poem, King Odysseus asks his friend Mentor to guide his son Telemachus through life. Unfortunately, Mentor isn’t up to the job, so the goddess Athena disguises herself as Mentor and advises Telemachus.
Today, the word “mentor” suggests a more experienced individual guiding a less experienced one through some part of their life. Workplace mentors are usually senior staff in the same field (sometimes in the same company) who help junior employees navigate their roles.
Most mentoring relationships are one-on-one, though there are some group programs. And according to research by Olivet Nazarene University, the average mentor-mentee pair meets less than once a month but spends four hours per month interacting.
Large organizations are increasingly seeing the benefits of mentoring as they learn that mentoring initiatives improve employee retention, increase profits, and help build a strong company culture. Currently, 84% of Fortune 500 companies and 100% of Fortune 50 companies have mentoring programs.
10 ways mentorship benefits your professional life
What are the benefits of mentorship in business? As a mentee, gaining support from a role model is priceless when it comes to your professional growth. Here are 10 invaluable benefits of receiving mentorship.
1. Clarified career goals
Talking with a mentor can help you map out your overall career path. With their support, you can pin down your short and long-term professional development goals and jointly come up with strategies to achieve them. A good mentor will listen to your career dreams, use their experience to assess whether or not your ideas are realistic, and help you turn achievable goals into small, actionable steps.
2. More work satisfaction
Research by CNBC and SurveyMonkey found that 91% of workers with a mentor feel satisfied with their jobs, an increase of more than 20% over those without one. The same study found that over 40% of workers without a mentor had seriously considered quitting in the past three months. For people with a mentor, the figure was 25%.
Mentoring is especially powerful in increasing job satisfaction among millennials, who are stereotyped as job-hopping and disloyal. When researchers asked millennials if they plan to stay with their current organization for at least five years, over two-thirds of those who said yes reported having a mentor.
3. Access to a psychologically safe environment
Mentoring relationships are usually separate from formal performance monitoring processes. A mentor’s job isn’t to evaluate your performance against a set of KPIs — it’s to gauge your performance against your own potential and help you bridge the gap between the two. Mentors offer a non-judgmental, psychologically safe space where you can ask questions without judgment, share difficult emotions, and be vulnerable.
4. An expanded professional network
If you’re in a mentoring relationship, tapping into your mentor’s network will give you a head start in building your own. Having a broad set of professional connections will expose you to more ideas, boost your visibility, and may very well help you find your next job.
5. More promotions
Mentoring can improve your chance of receiving a promotion. A study that focused on one company, Sun Microsystems, found that employees with mentors were five times more likely to gain a promotion than those without. Another study from the University of Toronto found that staff members who received mentoring were promoted after an average of 3.4 years, compared to 4.4 years for those who didn’t.
6. More raises
Being a mentee can increase your income. The above analysis of Sun Microsystems found that 25% of participants in the mentorship program reported increased salaries, while the figure was only 5% for those who didn’t participate. And another study found that mentored employees received bigger pay bumps than those who weren’t mentored, with lower-ranking employees receiving 22% more and senior managers receiving 34% more.
7. A more inclusive experience
For LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, and those working in a profession dominated by a different gender, learning from a mentor who’s fought the same battles is invaluable. There’s strong evidence that mentoring programs for women in tech increase participants’ self-confidence, improve their interview skills, and help them identify their strengths. And specialized mentoring programs can also help companies retain BIPOC employees.
8. Knowledge from a broader perspective
Junior employees usually don’t have a well-developed sense of their industry. A mentor can give you a big-picture account, teach you about its history, and point out the similarities and differences between different organizations in the space. And this bird’s eye view can help you be more strategic in your career moves and show you how your role fits into the broader context.
9. A sense of connection
Feelings of loneliness and disconnection can hit all types of workers, but those working remotely likely experience it even more. The regular, emotionally rich human contact in a mentoring relationship can serve as a lifeline for isolated employees.
10. Increased motivation
Supportive mentoring relationships can increase your motivation to perform well at work. For example, 73% of Gen Z say they’re more motivated to work hard when they feel their boss cares about and guides them. And similar results were found for more general mentoring programs, an effect that intensifies when there’s a close mentor-mentee relationship.
5 ways mentorship can benefit your personal life
The benefits of mentorship programs can overflow from your professional into your personal life. Here are five ways your life outside work benefits from mentoring.
1. Builds your self-confidence
The increased self-confidence you develop in a mentoring context can help you come out of your shell in social contexts. It might also make you steadier in crises and more resilient after setbacks. And seeking guidance fosters your growth mindset, so you’ll see challenges as opportunities to improve rather than tests you’re afraid of failing.
2. Increases your self-awareness
The constructive feedback that your mentor provides can give you an outside perspective on your capabilities, performance, and attitude. Seeing things from this new perspective builds self-awareness, a key leadership skill.
3. Improves your communication skills
Mentoring sessions can improve your communication skills in two ways. First, participating in the focused one-on-one exchanges in mentoring sessions can make you a better listener, help you articulate your thoughts more clearly, and improve your upward communication with senior staff members. Second, your mentor will prepare you to meet industry or position-specific communication needs, such as giving presentations, chairing meetings, or asking for a raise.
4. Boosts your goal-setting skills
Through mentorship, you’ll also gain valuable goal-setting skills. You can use these skills to define and then achieve goals in areas of your life outside work, such as finances, relationships, and personal development.
5. Supports your mental health
Everyone needs to feel they have someone in their corner. In tough situations, having a mentor cheering you on can be the difference between rage quitting and seeing the challenge as an opportunity to thrive. A calm mentor can teach you how to manage work-related anxiety and build mental fitness to buffer you against hardship and failure.
Does mentoring benefit mentors?
As a junior employee, you might feel reluctant to ask someone to mentor you because taking up their time concerns you. If so, don’t worry — this relationship also benefits your mentor. Here are five benefits a mentor can expect when offering guidance.
1. Increased professional development opportunities
Mentoring others can have significant career benefits. The Sun Microsystems study cited above found that people who serve as mentors are six times more likely to receive promotions than those who don’t. Mentors are also more likely to broaden their skill sets and improve their knowledge of the company’s customer base.
2. Improved listening skills
While mentors often share their experiences during sessions, the main focus of the session is always on the mentee. That means mentors must learn how to listen in a way that shows they respect and care for their conversation partner. Listening is a key leadership skill, so listening practice gives mentors a head start when vying for — and performing well in — senior leadership positions.
3. Better feedback delivery
Mentoring allows senior staff to learn how to give targeted, actionable feedback. Mentors can try different types of feedback and experiment with several tactics to inspire junior staff to perform their best.
4. Updated industry knowledge
Mentoring connects senior staff with younger employees, some just out of school. These newer professionals have learned up-to-date practices, tools, and competencies, and most will be happy to teach older staff about them. This upward knowledge sharing, or reverse mentoring, keeps mentors at the cutting edge of their field.
5. Bolstered mental health
Mentoring can have mental health benefits. Research conducted with police found that senior employees who mentored others experienced lower anxiety levels than those with no such relationship. As a form of prosocial (altruistic) behavior, mentoring may also offset the effects of stress and promote well-being.
Find a mentor who understands you
The first step in building a successful mentoring relationship is finding the right one, which you can do through either formal or informal channels. If your workplace doesn’t have a structured mentoring program, seek an informal relationship within or outside the company.
Even the best mentor isn’t magic. Most of the benefits of mentorship come from the work you do to put their advice into practice. But as you do, they’ll be cheering you on.
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