Why You Need a Mentor: 11 Truths

The best leaders have mentors for several reasons. No matter how successful a leader becomes, they still don’t know absolutely everything. Leaders that admit this are more likely to keep their teams on-side than those that don’t. Mentorship enables leaders to achieve more and motivate their teams into delivering better results, read these eleven truths to find out why.

If you’re wondering how to find a mentor, it could be easier than you think. Joining communities, making connections with business leaders and going to industry events are all great ways to start meeting the right figures and form long-term relationships with them. A quick Google search will help you learn more about various business mentorship programmes. Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at what a mentor actually is.

Mentor Definition

A mentor is someone who has sufficient experience that can share valuable tips and insights with you. A start-up mentor or business coach mentor can help you make the right decisions when you are growing your enterprise and let you know about any pitfalls you might need to be aware of. Let’s take a look at some of the main reasons why leadership mentoring is so beneficial and why so many business people are connecting with mentors – and why you should too.

1. To Continue the Learning Process

No matter how successful a leader becomes, there is always room for further growth. Most successful leaders have mentors that can continue to inspire them and provide them with extra knowledge. As a leader, you can simply never have too much knowledge, and there is always relevant new information to absorb.

2. To Gain an Objective Viewpoint

Over time, we can become so immersed in our day-to-day activities that we fail to see things from others’ points of view. A mentor can provide the objectivity that you need to make better decisions and provide an honest view of your current work. Chances are there are things you could be doing better to progress your leadership development. A mentor can provide feedback on areas that need improvement as well as ones in which are you excelling. The best kind of mentors are ones that are loosely connected to your career or business but aren’t personally involved in it. Many people choose older mentors as they can use their additional years or even decades of experience to provide a fresh perspective.

3. To Build Upon Their Strengths

Your mentor should be able to identify what your strengths are and offer advice on improving them even further. If we don’t continue to develop the skills we already have, we risk seeing our progress grind to a halt. Your mentor can help you become even better at what you do best whilst enabling you to improve in areas that require substantial work. Having access to a mentor is ideal for leadership coaching and development.

4. To Confide in Someone

Many leaders feel that they have nobody to turn to when they are struggling and when their confidence has taken a hit. Leaders can speak to their mentors in confidence about any challenges that they are facing. Mentors can also help you if you’ve been struggling to find someone that you can trust. When you start sharing your experiences with someone who’s achieved great success in your industry, you may find it easier to trust others.

5. To Expand Their Networks

When you create a strong relationship with a mentor, there’s a big likelihood that you’ll be introduced to some of their associates. Leadership mentoring can help you create more exceptional business connections. Your mentor may introduce you to people and opportunities that you didn’t know existed, whilst making you more visible to key business figures.

6. To Create More Time

Worrying about challenges when you have nobody to confide in can be incredibly time-consuming. It can make it take much longer to find a solution to the challenge that you are facing. By letting your mentor know about the obstacles you need to overcome, you can shorten the amount it takes to resolve your problem. There’s always a chance your mentor will have been through a very similar challenge themselves in the past.

7. To Feel More Motivated

Even the best leaders can suffer from a lack of motivation occasionally. It’s a leader’s job to motivate their team, but they can find it hard to keep themselves focused from time to time. Speaking to an accomplished mentor can help a leader rediscover their sense of purpose and help them become immersed in their duties once again. Leaders can also experience drops in confidence when business isn’t going so well, especially when they feel that they have nobody to turn to. Once you have a mentor that you can trust, you should be able to contact them at any time when motivation is floundering.

8. To Get Outside of Their Comfort Zones

Mentors can help leaders think in new ways and encourage them to strive for things they may have never thought possible. A quality mentor may ask leaders why they don’t think something is achievable and encourage them to aim higher.

9. To Cut Stress

Having someone to offload to can be incredibly useful for leaders. Leadership comes with a great deal of responsibility, and the leader is often the first person to receive blame when things go wrong. A mentor can let a leader know how they have dealt with similar challenges in the past and act as their confidant.

10. To Accept Feedback More Happily

Some leaders are more willing to accept criticism than others. Great leaders take constructive criticism on board rather than simply feeling invalidated or offended. Once a leader gets used to accepting feedback, they are more likely to turn it into something positive. This process can help leaders provide helpful constructive feedback to others.

11. Maintaining a Great Leader-Mentor Relationship

If the relationship between a mentor and a leader is to be a successful, beneficial one, the two individuals must be in regular contact. They must communicate with each other honestly and ensure all important issues are addressed.

Are you ready to connect with a mentor?

Many leaders have gone on to achieve much bigger and better things after forming quality relationships with mentors who have several years of industry experience behind them. The leader must accept they can never know too much if the relationship is to be a success. In time, the leader may go onto become a mentor themselves after experiencing the benefits of this arrangement.

This type of relationship can also be highly beneficial for the entrepreneur mentor as well as the leader.

Passing on advice and wisdom can be highly rewarding, especially when it generates visible success. Mentoring can help leaders enhance their coaching skills, enabling them to get the best out of their teams. It can also help leaders become better listeners and motivators.