Things went well for a while, but now you feel you’ve hit a plateau, and your career feels like it isn’t developing as you’d initially hoped.
How do you get out of this lull? How can you get ahead in your career? Career mentoring is one way to improve your career outlook, but do you understand how it works? Do you know the types of mentoring? Let’s dig deeper and see what type of mentoring is suitable for you.
What is a mentoring relationship?
Traditionally, a mentoring relationship is established between a senior professional (mentor) and a more junior professional aspiring to learn and develop their career.
Formal mentorship programs are utilized by individuals and organizations such as businesses, banks, hospitals, schools, and universities to facilitate their employees’ growth.
However, the purpose and type of mentoring can differ from one industry to another.
Types of mentoring
If you are looking for a mentoring program, it can be challenging to know where to begin. So, before adopting a mentoring program, you need to determine what type of mentoring works best for you based on your career goals.
Here are the three major types of mentoring:
One-on-One Mentoring
This type of mentoring involves regular face-to-face meetings between one mentor and one mentee. Usually, a senior-level individual mentors a junior individual with complete focus on the mentee’s desired results and wants. This includes personality and skills development, work-life balance problems, or career progress in general.
Typically, this mentoring is done via private mentoring sessions with the least possible distractions. This is beneficial for both the mentor and mentee. The mentors can give dedicated time and focus all the energy on a single mentee, while it also provides the mentee with a high level of responsibility and accountability.
This is a tried-and-tested and more “familiar” mentorship model. It has few benefits such as:
- It sets an excellent foundation for talent development.
- It is an intensive and collaborative mentor-mentee engagement.
- It promotes knowledge, sharing and builds trust.
- It helps aspiring professionals acquire employable and valuable skills.
- It introduces junior professionals to a whole new network of experts.
Group Mentoring
Group mentoring is where a single mentor oversees multiple mentees or when one mentee has numerous mentors. Regardless of the format, such mentoring groups effectively strengthen the relationship between all participants involved and encourages a natural exchange of information in a team-based environment.
Group mentoring allows sharing of different ideas among the program members and provides unique advice to the mentees. Group members feel confident about speaking up, exposing their vulnerabilities to colleagues, and suggesting ideas without fear of judgment and rebuke.
Group mentoring creates a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.
Group mentoring has the following benefits:
- Mentees gain insights from the mentor as well as from their peers.
- Sharing career dreams and ambitions generates a sense of belonging and mutual trust.
- It develops diversity of thinking, practice, and understanding.
- Participants become acquainted with co-learning environments.
- Participants also learn to help others and take responsibility for self-learning too.
Rapid Change Transformation Mentoring
As the name suggests, this type of mentoring has an obvious objective – rapid results!
Rapid change transformation mentoring is also one-on-one mentoring. It aims to evaluate the mentee by identifying blockages in their career growth or a particular problem they need to address.
For example, this could be about a specific job they want to land, a specific skill set to work towards, or simply identifying what’s limiting their growth. In any case, it has a specified goal.
This might lead you to think, “How does a mentor do it?” Well, most mentors (or coaches) that offer rapid mentoring are NLP practitioners.
If you are not aware, NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) is a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal.
So, mentors combine NLP techniques and industry knowledge and experience to get a deep understanding and fast results related to an extensive range of psychological-professional issues.
Usually, one session is enough to identify the problem and break down its solution. However, the sessions can be increased as per the mentee’s satisfaction and requirement.
The benefits of rapid change transformation mentoring include:
- Enhanced learning and engagement
- Heightened focus on the problem at hand
- Fast results through actionable response
These are the three major types of mentoring that you need to be familiar with; however, all three types of mentoring programs have specific focus areas within the organization.
These programs are further divided into subcategories based upon the focus and mentorship goals.
Categories of Mentoring
Two of the most popular versions of focused mentoring programs are:
- Career Development Mentoring
- Business Mentoring
- Personal Development – to get a better version of you
These programs focus on the organizational movement of mentors’ and mentees’, and both have their benefits.
Career Development Mentoring
Individuals (mentees) who have a desire to take their career forward opt for career development mentoring.
This type of mentoring includes both vertical and horizontal movement. Hence it is excellent for mentees seeking a career change. However, career development mentoring requires the mentor to be in the career that the mentee is looking to move into.
Business Mentoring
Business mentoring focuses on vertical movement and succession planning, making it a fantastic choice for competent employees who are succession candidates.
Since it focuses on teaching mentees how to make their way up through the organization, business mentoring requires that the mentors are leaders. Also, these leaders must be great teachers who are able and willing to help younger employees move up the leadership chain.
Both career and business development mentoring have significant benefits that include:
- Succession planning
- Organisational marketability to potential employees
- Increased productivity
- Internal growth
- Improved employee retention
- Diversified leadership teams
Personal Development – to get a better version of you
Your mentor may ask you to reflect and review your present condition and circumstances. They will teach you how to get in touch with yourself to tune into thoughts and prompt you to have open and probative conversations with yourself. They may teach you reflective practice, a structured technique requiring you to study an experience and direct your observations to the thoughts and feelings that arise from the experience. This will help you become more attuned to yourself and helps forecast how you may react to specific experiences allowing you to be proactive rather than reactive.
Personal Development with a mentor does the following:
- It helps you become self-sufficient
- Cultivates your self-confidence and competency
- Promotes self-assessment and self-awareness
- Enhances your interpersonal skills
- Teaches you to evaluate and adapt thoughtfully, regardless of the circumstance
The true essence of mentoring
The essence of mentoring is that it simultaneously adds an incredible amount of value at organizational and individual levels.
Since mentoring is a learning relationship taking place in a carefully managed framework, it gradually strengthens the mentors and mentees and their relationship toward the overall purpose.
A mentorship framework is flexible and doesn’t have an exact curriculum. Still, it manages to provide guidelines and tools for growth and career advancement.
Finally, it doesn’t matter if you are a single mentee or with others in mentoring groups; mentorship makes room for every involved individual to set their goals and objectives.
Are you looking to get into a mentorship program? See how we can help.