Sometimes in order to succeed in a job or a profession or to get better at something, we need to rely on other people to help us a little. Business people have many opportunities to build relationships and contacts that can take them further.

One of those relationships is MENTORING.

A mentor is someone who offers his or her knowledge, experience, wisdom and advice to someone who is less experienced in the field.

Mentoring has a more holistic approach than Coaching. The difference is that Coaches are usually professionally qualified, certified for special parts of coaching.

So if you feel that you would like to be better at work or in your professional life, but also in your social life, find a mentor. It could be a colleague, a boss, an acquaintance or even someone you simply admire and could help you.

So if you start having such a mentor, you become a so-called mentee.

Many companies have programs in place on how to actually do mentoring and what is expected from the mentee.

If you want someone to mentor you, the key point is always to prepare in advance the individual points you would like to discuss with the mentor and let him know about it in advance.

Many mentees make the mistake of expecting the mentor to simply guide them. But communication of expectations is important.

The second point is regularity and showing mutual respect. If you drop your mentoring acitivity multiple times in a row, momentum is lost and then it doesn’t work.

In the IT segment it is great especially for juniors, but also for specialists to seek out more experienced colleagues who can guide them through the difficulties of the beginning.

Don’t be discouraged, even juniors and young people can be mentors.

Companies also use and actively involve juniors in mentoring to mentor senior colleagues.

Yes, common mistakes are that senior management is afraid to reveal their weaknesses, shortcomings, ignorance, but if they overcome those, they gain a great bond among the juniors and at the same time they build confidence. We could debate about the problems endlessly, but I won’t discuss it here.

It is known from practice that large companies, for example, apply reverse mentoring not only to make the management understand how new technologies work, social networks, how to use modern tools, but also about to get information on what young people want, how they think, how they live. This gives companies a huge know how and they can implement such knowledge to improve corporate strategies.

Young people have the opportunity to express themselves, to get a space for their opinions and thus help to contribute and improve the functioning of companies, they bring their part in the strategy. All this creates a good environment for employee growth, which actually leads to lower employee turnover.

Both parties always gain great benefits from a mentoring relationship.

For the mentor it is actually training of different skills, especially soft skills, and for the mentee it is receiving advice and insight from a more experienced person. This builds effective relationships between colleagues and the company acquires the quality environment and builds a certain part of the culture that contributes to employees being motivated and satisfied and not having reason to change jobs so often.

Many companies have mentoring in place, but often many small companies underestimate it.

Whether you are a small or large company, whether you work as a junior, medior, senior, look around you and try to talk about the benefits of mentoring and ask companies where it already applied how to do it.