4 Founders: The importance of mentorship to their success
Today we celebrate National Mentoring Day, founded by award-winning business mentor, Briton Chelsey Baker — a day aimed to highlight the importance of mentoring and focus on how rewarding mentoring can be for everyone involved.
In honor of those who have helped shaped who they are today, our four very different founders, share the importance mentorship has played in their success and pay tribute to the mentoring they’ve received and given.
Empower
Working in tech, I’d often been the only woman in a room. As a result, I felt I had to be absolutely certain of something before I spoke. It wasn’t until mid-career that I had the privilege of working with a very accomplished woman, who revealed to me that many men she had worked with tended to talk when they were only 60% sure, and I shouldn’t wait to be perfect before voicing my thoughts. That one comment gave me newfound confidence to speak up and be heard. After all, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it, and we all can benefit from hearing different perspectives.
Nudge
I have been lucky to have mentors from very early in my career, formal as well as informal. For me, mentorship is recognizing strengths and weaknesses and improving with constructive feedback, timely nudges, and a goal-based path ahead. My best mentors have helped me see my blind spots and encouraged me to devise my own path to conquer them. I do the same with my mentees where the solutions are their own to find, implement, and forge ahead.
Support
As a professional woman of color, mentors have played an important part in my career development. One of the most surprising areas of mentorship that I have found to be most supportive has been my peer mentoring circle, my own personal Board of Directors. This is a group of my colleagues and friends, in many different fields, that I talk to about my career moves. They serve as a sounding board, a safe place to vent, a safer place to dream, and most importantly they hold me accountable for the things that I said I wanted. This is a reciprocal relationship and I do the same for them. My Board of Directors is diverse in generation, field, ethnicity, and gender; and I love being enriched by their different perspectives and how they all listen to me differently.
Serve
I have benefitted from various forms of mentorship my whole life — providing advice, perspective, challenge, advocacy, and emotional support. One piece of advice that I received that defined at least a decade of my career was: “There are two phrases that every boss in the world deeply appreciates. They are “I will take care of that” and “it’s been taken care of”. That really stuck with me for its clarity, simplicity and underlying call for service of others. And it has stayed with me ever since I first heard it even though one might have labeled me as the boss.
Let’s aim today to encourage interactive discussions to showcase the invaluable and rewarding benefits of being a mentor and being mentored. The contributions that mentoring makes go beyond an individual, having a huge impact on not only our economy but on our society, our workplaces, and our culture. Show your appreciation, recognize those who have made a difference, and share your story.
Need a better way to create a company culture that values learning and development? Contact us to learn how Eskalera’s smart and structured mentoring tool, helps individual employees thrive by developing mentoring relationships and working together to achieve their aspirations.
Originally published at https://eskalera.com on October 27, 2020.
