Mentoring for Business Success – Part 3 – Business Clarity through mentoring.
Achieving business clarity is substantially easier with a knowledgeable and understanding mentor. In a business mentoring relationship there is generally an emphasis on the business owner and their role as leader. At the same time, the mentor is faced with the challenge of questioning, understanding, challenging, and ultimately elevating the mentee’s business clarity.
Yale University School of Management senior faculty fellow, Bruce Judson, says a good mentor should ask questions about the mentee’s end result, their idea of success, the ultimate objective of the business, and both business and personal financial goals. Judson makes a vital point, as these questions lead to a better understanding of the business, and provide foundations and direction.
(Source: http://www.inc.com/guides/how-to-find-a-business-mentor.html)
Questioning
For a mentor, being curious, questioning the mentee is a vital part of the process. It is questioning to gain insight into the core values, as well as, many other facets of the business. Through the questioning process, both the mentee and mentor will be unlocking clarity.
Challenging
On the path to business clarity, your mentor will undoubtedly challenge you. Without challenging the basis of your current business model, ideals, and subsequent results, it would not be possible to make change stick.
Understanding
Your mentor should work by questioning in order to gain understanding of the many facets of your business, including operations, core values, marketing strategy and approach, sales processes, and other aspects like its target market, and collaborative business relationships. Lois Zachary, author of The Mentee’s Guide: Making Mentoring Work For You, says the ideal mentor should listen, be well connected in the industry, have expertise in a specific field, and perhaps most importantly, be accessible to the mentee. Zachary goes on to say that while it may be unlikely to find all of these things in a mentor, you should prioritise which matter most, and then seek out someone that fits the bill. Working with your mentor can then lead you to figure how to improve your business moving forward.
Elevating
Taking your business to the next level is the obvious outcome of working successfully with a mentor, their questioning, understanding, and insight, should allow your company to flourish and to further progress as a leader. Whether you have a mentor in mind, or not yet, your main objective should be to create greater clarity.
A mentors view
A mentor is there to challenge, but not accuse, to support not judge, to guide not direct, all with a focus of making your business better. They seek protégés who view their curiosity and in depth discussions as a sign of good things to come. Some methodologies employed will be based on proven processes and every good mentor has a mental infrastructure of how to help a mentee. Keep in mind that they have almost certainty been in the same position as you. Every mentor has likely also been a mentee at various points in his or her career. Openness and trust are key.
Read more in Part 1 here… and understand more about working with a mentor in Part 2 here…
If these thoughts here resonate with you, then you can book in a call with me here… to explore the topic further.
Credits: Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash