Mentoring: a mutually beneficial relationship between mentor and mentee that serves to create strong organizational ties while offering networking opportunities. In other words; a learning and development partnership between someone with vast experience and someone who wants to learn. But why mentoring in shipping? What’s the value of mentorship in this field?
The value of mentoring is becoming increasingly recognized in almost every industry, mostly because of the impact mentoring can have on the achievement of organizational goals. However, many of us do not really know a few key things about mentoring, wrongly thinking that we formally request a mentor relationship, that he or she must earn more for a living and mostly that we are going to have one mentor forever. It is important though to differentiate the term coaching from mentoring.
4 differentiators between mentoring and coaching
- Mentoring is relationship oriented
Coaching is task oriented
- Mentoring is development driven
Coaching is performance driven
- Mentoring requires a design phase
Coaching does not require design
- In mentoring, the immediate manager is indirectly involved
In coaching, the immediate manager is a critical partner
6 Reasons why a shipping company should consider mentoring
- to develop leadership or talent pool as part of succession planning
- to work on diversity issues that hinder their success
- to help its staff in ways that are additional to the acquisition of specific skills/competencies
- to retain its internal expertise and experience on shipping related issues residing in its baby boomer employees for future generations
- to create a workforce that balances the professional and the personal
- mentees perform better
What a mentorship relationship needs to succeed
- Compatibility: The mentor and mentee need to be able to converse easily and strongly help each other. The relationship doesn’t need to be formal enough.
- A two-way street: It is of essence that mentees are not just expecting to receive professional advice without giving back.
- Clear objective: Having clear expectation helps guide the mentoring process towards the right direction. A mentor is here to help mentee grow on his/her career path.
- Relationship Goals: Establishing clear goals is key for discovering what we want to achieve out of our mentoring relationship; mapping out our efforts and moving forward.
What does a mentor look like?
A mentor
- provides strategic insights and practical thinking
- is someone you could talk to openly
- is smart and kind
- loves to brainstorm with the employees under him
- fosters growth & independence thinking
- The term “mentor” comes from The Odyssey. Odysseus asked his friend Mentor to help watch over his son Telemachus while Odysseus was away at the Trojan War. Twenty years later, the goddess of wisdom Athena disguises herself as Mentor to provide Telemachus crucial advice at the start of the epic story: to investigate what happened to his father.
- The vast majority of Mentors have had personally benefitted from a mentor-mentee relationship.
