Mentoring is the process of sharing your knowledge and experience with an employee.
Mentoring can be informal or formal:
Informal mentoring takes place spontaneously between senior and more junior employees.
Formal mentoring occurs through a program with an established structure.
A mentor can be an employee’s manager or not:
Management typically involves at least some employee mentoring. In acting as a mentor for an employee who reports to you, think of yourself as an advocate for that employee—not for any particular behavior, but for the person—for their personal growth and career. Discipline can then become a matter of helping an employee out of a difficult situation.
In formal mentoring programs, the mentor is typically not the employee’s manager, nor even in the employee’s chain of command.
Mentoring is an ongoing relationship that is developed between a senior and junior employee. Mentoring provides guidance and clear understanding of how the organization goes to achieve its vision and mission to the junior employee.
The purpose of a mentor ship program is to match up a manager or other experienced employee with someone new to the company or position. The mentor takes a mentee, or protégé, under her wing and helps groom his professional career. A mentor program can be formal, as in the case of assigning a mentor to a protégé and following specific guidelines for the program, or it can be informal, such as to encourage people to volunteer their services or seek out a mentor and meet on their own terms. A successful mentoring program will not only help retain employees, it will assist your training efforts and help boost employee morale.
The meetings are not as structured and regular than in coaching. Executive mentoring is generally done by someone inside the company. The executive can learn a lot from mentoring. By dealing with diverse men-tee’s, the executive is given the chance to grow professionally by developing management skills and learning how to work with people with diverse background, culture, and language and personality types.
Executives also have mentors. In cases where the executive is new to the organization, a senior executive could be assigned as a mentor to assist the new executive settled into his role. Mentoring is one of the important methods for preparing them to be future executives. This method allows the mentor to determine what is required to improve men-tee’s performance. Once the mentor identifies the problem, weakness, and the area that needs to be worked upon, the mentor can advise relevant training. The mentor can also provide opportunities to work on special processes and projects that require use of proficiency.
“Mentoring is the Employee training system under which a senior or more experienced person (the mentor) is assigned to act as an adviser, counselor, or guide to a junior or trainee. The mentor is responsible for providing support to, and feedback on, the person in his or her charge.”