Mentoring for Leadership: Improve Your Leadership Skills Through Mentoring

In today’s competitive world, building leadership skills is an important part of career development. Even organizations understand the value of developing leadership skills in their employees. However, not many organizations know how to develop it within the workforce.

Companies often send their employees to leadership training programs, which are expensive and don’t always provide the desired results. And one-time training is not very helpful for leadership development.

Mentoring is a great way to practice leadership. Though it requires more effort and time than offline training, the result is exceptional.

A case study by ResearchGate suggests that mentoring offers significant benefits for developing leadership skills. Mentors and mentees also recognized that exposing issues and problems can make them vulnerable, and in a leadership role, which is isolated, this may be more pronounced.

Mentoring Programs to Consider for Leadership Development

Though mentoring is a one-on-one relationship between an experienced senior professional and a younger employee, mentoring thought leaders might need different approaches than traditional mentoring. You can consider these 2 types of mentoring as per your organization’s needs:

Also Read: Top Mentoring Training Strategies for New Mentors

1. Group Mentoring

Group mentoring is an effective way of mentoring where a group of mentors guide a group of mentees. The mentees can learn from mentors as well as from peers which is extremely helpful in one’s development. Mentees get exposure to different perspectives and ideas which help them to see things differently.

2. Reverse Mentoring

In reverse mentoring, younger employees share their knowledge with senior professionals in the organization. It helps the mentor develop leadership skills as it allows employees from different generations to communicate and collaborate. The mentors gain access to the strategic thinking of experienced leaders which enhances their leadership quality.

How Mentoring Improves Leadership Skills?

Mentoring can help both mentors and mentees sharpen their leadership skills in several ways. Here we will discuss how it can improve the mentor’s leadership skills.

Mentoring makes you a better listener:

One of the best qualities of a leader is being a good listener. 

Say an employee is talking to their manager about some issues they are facing in an organization; the manager is listening, but at the same time, thinking about the topics he is supposed to discuss in his next meeting. How will he understand the employee’s real problem?

By mentoring someone, you train yourself to pay complete attention to others when they are speaking. You practice active listening, where you not only focus on others’ words but also focus on their non-verbal cues. You understand their body language and learn to read between the lines.

Also Read: Top 5 Mentoring Challenges and Their Solutions

Mentoring broadens your perspective:

The biggest challenge professionals face in growing leadership skills is broadening their perspectives. For example, a salesperson who is focused on increasing revenue might not have an understanding of other issues in the organization, like the quality of the product.

Mentoring gives you the opportunity to work with people from different departments, generations, and races, which allows you to develop a broader organizational perspective. You gain the ability to take others’ viewpoints into account when making decisions and forming an opinion. Which, in turn, enhances your problem-solving skills.

Mentoring makes you a better communicator:

A great leader must be a great communicator. If you cannot communicate your vision and strategy precisely to your team, you will not get the desired result.

By solving your mentee’s problems, sharing your own experience with them, and guiding them through difficult times, you practice advanced communication, which helps you go one step ahead towards becoming a great leader.

If you want to become a mentor to develop your leadership skills, we suggest you take an online mentor training course. It will help you better understand your roles and responsibilities as a mentor.

Also Read:

7 Reasons Why You Should Become a Mentor