New Year, New Me(ntor)

With the year-end fast approaching and a new decade around the corner, businesses and senior management alike are faced with certain indecision surrounding how best to start off the new year. The need to ‘put the best foot forward’ can at times be a daunting thought as it raises the question of “where are we expecting to be and how do we intend on getting there?”.

Making a resolution to find the best fitting mentor, or teams of mentors, for the trajectory of your company and various levels of staff at the beginning of a New Year is a positive and progressive move made at the right time. What is certain is that inaction can invariably effect your pace and productivity for the year to come. The beginning of a new decade is the perfect excuse to invigorate your inputs, guided by an experienced and capable professional, so as to effectively enhance the quality of your outputs. Mentors serve as a guiding support to tailor plans and initiatives that best fit the wellbeing of your most important asset; your team.    

Professional relationships can, over time, lead to stagnation. What once was exciting and fresh is now the norm, things that were once wildly unexpected and ground-breaking are now expected deliverables. In circumstances where fresh approaches are pivotal in ascertaining the value of what you already have, mentorship is key. And in a market where unemployment is plummeting and succinctly impacting on retention rates, company’s and senior management need to seriously take note and ‘wise up’. Onboarding an objective individual (or individuals for that matter) whose purpose is to advise in a non-partisan manner will determine the strength of the group as a whole through tapping into individual competencies.    

A major aspect of mentoring the modern workplace lies in combining expertise with a measure of humility, honesty and appreciation. Where younger generations and modern-day work teams are not satisfied to adopt a ‘live to work’ attitude, there is no denying that the traditional organisation, along with the expectations it would historically yield, is evolving at a rapid rate.  Almost ironically is that the need for senior management to exercise human traits that (should be) inherent such as the ability to listen, appreciate and advise with best interest at heart is at an all-time low. Trends such as job crafting, in which the individual applies their own personal strengths and interests to their role as a means of enhancing and redefining their job responsibilities, are being adopted by more and more employees to help foster a deeper sense of job satisfaction. Couple the need for humility with upskilling and job crafting consistently rising, people are seeking to redefine their role whilst all the while doing so under the guidance of a seasoned individual with long standing coaching and credibility.

This is mentorship. Lending freedom, creativity and progression to the workplace, allowing for roles to better fit motive, meaning and career trajectory whilst all the while enhancing a work culture built on trust and belief. Mentorship can assist with senior management in identifying how best to get the most from their teams through encouraging the cognitive rearranging and redesigning of one’s skillset.

It can redefine traditional business metrics in keeping the values of the organisation at the forefront of decision making, which in itself can be used to benchmark against competition in a systematic and measured way.  

Different quarters and seasons throughout the year bring with them a different pace that runs through the pulse of the business. The welcomed anti-pole of a frenzied run up to Christmas is the deserved and natural wind down during the period after. Take advantage of this time to take a step back and assess the benefits that mentorship can bring to your business upon entering an exciting new decade.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at Mentors.

Ronan Harbison is Commercial Director with Mentors. For more information on how Mentors can guide you into a prosperous New Year, contact Ronan at [email protected] or call +353 1 4871180/+353 86 805 8624.