Congratulations to all the women— in 40 different markets —participating today in Mentoring Monday sponsored by the Business Journals. As a professional development expert who teaches and has consulted on mentoring strategies and programs, I will attest that mentoring relationships can shorten a learning curve, accelerate growth and provide the know-how necessary to successfully navigate the vagaries and complexities of our new global workplace.
While there’s no doubt this initiative is fantastic, its real value today — given the one-off, quick fix mentoring minutes — is in the connections it can foster between and among the women attending. Ideally, there’s an arc to a mentoring relationship that starts with solidifying trust and rapport and then continues to build over time, increasingly addressing career issues of strategy, logistics and performance. Implicit in and essential to this arrangement are high levels of commitment (mentor and protege have to be equally committed) and the acknowledgment of accountability: mentoring is truly a two-way street, with the protege assuming at least as much responsibility as the mentor.
So, with continuity, commitment and accountability, a well-managed mentoring relationship challenges thinking, inspires action and allows for course correction in real time.
In the not too distant past, there’s been pushback in the research suggesting that women don’t benefit as much as men do from mentoring. Perhaps this event and other wide scale ones like it can bring new traction and breathe a vital spark into an age-old modality.