by Kate Oliver
As part of developing the Future Leaders Network (FLN), we’ve been thinking about the role of mentoring in the charity sector.
Whether as a mentor or mentee, mentoring can be a really valuable part of supporting people to develop their careers. For mentees, in particular, it can provide support beyond your immediate organisation or peers, and there can be real benefit to having someone else to bounce ideas off, help you find solutions to tricky problems and to move forward in your career - whatever that looks like to you.
We know that lots of people have had great experiences of mentoring. However, we also know that there can be challenges accessing a mentor, and that a mentoring relationship doesn’t always provide us with what we’d hoped it would.
Expanding access to mentoring is something we’re particularly interested in at the FLN. As we’ve been pulling together our plans, we’ve found ourselves reflecting on the impact of mentoring, and the effect it has had on our careers and leadership journeys. As part of our conversations, we thought about how mentoring has helped us, what we wish we’d have known about mentoring before we started, and what we’ve learnt along the way.
Finding the right mentor for you
Reflecting on my own experience, the one thing I’d wish I’d known to consider is that you don’t need to stick with the first mentor you find, if you realise that you’re just not clicking. I've been lucky enough to have a few different mentors over the last ten years, and each one of them has offered me something different. A really important part of finding the right mentor for you (and this applies to mentees too!) is thinking through the key aspects you want to align on.
I've had mentors in the past who shared my career experience and ambitions, but didn't necessarily reflect my values, and vice versa - so I would really recommend having a good think about where you want your mentor to help you, and that might mean realising it’s time to respectfully part ways. My current mentor is the perfect mix for me: someone who knows about my general field of work, but more importantly shares some of my life experiences and views, which means that I'm really open to her help and challenge because the foundations of respect and understanding are already there.
The benefits of being a mentor
In our conversations about the benefits and impact of mentoring, Grace shared that it’s also very rare that mentoring only benefits the person being mentored. Being a mentor is a brilliant way to build your own management and leadership skills. Within the sector, it can be easy to find yourself in a catch-22, where you want to take a step up and become a manager but it can be hard to do that without experience to show you can. Becoming a mentor can really help there.
You might not be managing someone day-to-day, but you will be helping them to problem solve, to achieve their aims and objectives and to identify and address their development needs. These are all key things a manager needs to be able to do and it gives you great experience to talk about in interviews. Plus, it can be hugely rewarding knowing you’ve supported someone else to develop in their career.
Getting another perspective
Holly has equally benefited from being both a mentor and a mentee. In terms of being mentored, she’s hugely appreciated the advice and alternative perspective that having this relationship with someone outside of her organisation has provided her with. She’s been fortunate to have wise and inspiring mentors who have been incredibly supportive of her development and thinking through her career and leadership aspirations as much as day to day challenges.
What is clear to us is that mentoring can offer us an insight into not just what it’s like to be a leader, but also how to use our skills and expertise most effectively, how to grow our networks, and how to seek advice and inspiration when we need it the most.
Making sure that more people can access that support is particularly important to us and we’ll be sharing more information with our members about our plans in this area very soon. If you haven’t already, sign up to the Future Leaders Network to be the first to hear about it.