Mentoring

The story of Mentor already started in Homer Odyssey. When Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, left for the Trojan War he placed his old friend Mentor in charge of his palace whose task was also not only to educate his son, Telemachus, but to teach him to be a responsible man, too.

After the War, Odysseus was condemned to a hopeless wandering for the long period of 10 years in the endeavour to come back home. In the meantime, his son Telemachus grew and left to find his father. Athena, the goddess of warfare and the patroness of handicrafts, assumed the role of Mentor and accompanied Telemachus on his journey.

Within the time, the word Mentor has became the synonym of a trustworthy advisor, friend, teacher and educated person. Mentoring is a basic form of human development when one person invests his/her time, energy and personal know-how to make another person to grow and develop his/her skills. Mentoring was traditionally interpreted as a formal process in which older and more experienced person helps and leads younger person in the process of education within the society. Mentoring often describes activities of an experienced person preparing a younger colleague for individual activities, providing him/her a career development, and encouraging his/her high performance standards. If successful, mentoring significantly influenced the respective person’s career as well as his/her life.

Mentors were also the experienced and older people within an organization who took newcomers under their wings, protected them and taught them. However, such an approach was recently criticized a lot for its tendency to prefer individuals, career development, and internal policy of companies.

Mentoring may be defined as an important, long-term and beneficial influence on a respective person’s style and life, and, generally, as a result of personal contact one towards another. Mentor is a person who offers knowledge, view, approach or wish that are specifically important for another person.

Mentoring may be provided anytime and nearly anywhere. Mentoring may also be in the form of a single intervention or long-term relation. It may be provided in an informal friendly way or in a formal method as a part of career development of employees.

Mentoring is a process where Mentor and Mentee (one who is mentored) work together on discovering and development of hidden abilities of Mentee and encourage Mentee to gain knowledge and skills as an opportunity to stimulate his/her needs. Mentor serves as an efficient instructor, advisor and friend.

You may ask: Is Mentoring suitable for me or my company?

At present, Mentoring is a quite underestimated form of expert development. Quality of performance of individual employees in the sphere of services is often smaller than we would expect and to implement mentoring by the employer is a very advisable and clever solution. However, each Mentor has to be prepared for such a role very carefully. He/she has to answer the question whether he/she is ready from the psychological point of view to invest time and effort to help other people.

If the Mentoring project is prepared well and its implementation is managed well, too – it is a prove method that leads to the result that not only the Mentor be respected inside the company but also the company turnover will increase and the customer service will improve, which becomes more and more important for more and more companies.


Article’s author:
Michal Kopřiva
TOP C Trainer and Executive