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How Becoming a Mentor Can Boost Your Career
July 21, 2010
In my last blog (“Why Women Should Have Mentors in Business”) I talked about the importance of women using mentors to help them in their careers. For this blog, I thought I’d take the opposite approach and discuss the benefits of becoming a mentor to other women.
As it relates to business, I think of a mentor as someone who helps another person grow, develop, or progress forward in their career. Many women begin their careers as a mentee, seeking out others who are willing to help them. But as we get older I believe it’s important to reach out and mentor younger women, not only to help them with their careers; we should become mentors because being a mentor can actually help our own careers!
Here are some of the key reasons for becoming a mentor:
- Better understand the business: “My mentee helped me see issues in the company that I didn’t know existed.”
- Better understand how people perceive you: “I was able to see the perception others held of me, through the eyes of my mentee.”
- Create a larger network: “By helping others I’ve also created a network of allies I can rely upon when I need help.”
- Help solve issues: “I’ve been able to step out of my own shoes and help my mentees see things from other perspectives. This, in turn, has helped me in resolving issues within my own department.”
- Personal satisfaction: “I have been able to watch and actively help younger women succeed in our industry – and it’s such a wonderful feeling to help another person succeed!”
Now that you’ve heard about the benefits of mentoring from other women, here are some very interesting stats that were compiled by the Human Resources department of Sun Microsystems, as quoted by Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer, on March 12, 2007 on CNN Money online.
Sun Microsystems compared the career progress of approximately 1,000 employees over a 5-year period and here’s what they found:
- Both mentors and mentees were approximately 20% more likely to get a raise than people who did not participate in the mentoring program.
- 25% of mentees and 28% of mentors received a raise – versus only 5% of managers who were not mentors.
- Employees who received mentoring were promoted FIVE times more often than people who didn’t have mentors.
- Mentors were SIX times more likely to have been promoted to a bigger job.
Mentoring another person is one of the greatest gifts you could give them. And there’s almost no better feeling in the world than to help another person accomplish their dreams. There’s an unexplained karma in the world that you get what you give and the more people you mentor the more the rewards come back to you, only multiplied.
Interested in becoming a mentor but not sure how to get started? Then check out the Wing to Wing Women’s Mentoring Project website to download the free Mentoring Guide. The Wing to Wing Women’s Mentoring Project is a global volunteer movement that aims to inspire women to reach out to other women and, through the simple act of offering guidance and insight, help them achieve their personal and professional aspirations. I founded this volunteer movement because I envision a world where women actively reach out to other women and offer their professional and personal support; mentoring women to success. The goal of the program is to eliminate negative competitiveness and encourage positive assistance, woman to woman, one woman at a time.
Help a woman spread her wings and fly by becoming a volunteer mentor today!
~ Lisa Quast
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July 21st, 2010 at 8:07 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Harry Winter, J Jackson. J Jackson said: How Becoming a Mentor Can Boost Your Career | Career Woman Blog http://bit.ly/9sMAGb [...]
July 21st, 2010 at 2:14 pm
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