Businesses and firms today aims to be on the tops over its competitors, employees at all levels were challenge to compete with themselves, improves communication and learning, exemplary performances and hitting the goals and targets. At the end of the day, week, month or a year, leaders reviewed their specific accomplishments on every key areas assigned to them based on various performance indicators.
With these lots of challenging situation, it is expected that these leaders were not the sole source of accomplishments and knowledge on how to achieve their goals, rather, each department or section were trained to lead the team as second-liners as to operation and decision making needed on day-to-day transactions. That’s why mentoring plays an important role to delegate the task to its respective team members. But mentoring is not that easy at all as you will need to consider various factors that could affect the learner and the learning process.
Mentors should be credible and expected to have a constant constructive feedback to its mentee, to boost their confidence despite of their inner doubts and fears, and to support when opportunities come on reaching the goals in the face of challenges. Further, he should consider that every individual has his own self-paced of learning and that output may not be seen immediately.
In our workplace, we have this mentees assigned to each of us on our current outlets. We are expected to guide, teach and provide solutions on their day-to-day transactions. We have to lessen the risk on their exposure to break the internal control and policies.
This article on mentoring is feasible and agreeable in various principles it tackled. I firmly believe that its every individual of the team is different from each other, we can’t and shouldn’t compare against each team members. Rather, leaders should identify each member strength and weaknesses that they can fully utilize to achieve their goals. Mentoring is personal as every individual has different talents and abilities and that we can also learn from them as a mentor on various things that they have knowledge on. Mentoring should also be interactive, we have to made them feel that we believe on them, we hear them and we support them. Despite of the risk and challenge, as a mentor we should diagnose the root cause to provide solution and improve their learning. We have to build their confidence and feedback them on the ways and means to improve their performance and behaviour.
In my personal experience, we are mentoring our staff on various concern like inventory management, documentation, internal control policy and financial analysis in which we challenge them as front line on transacting with the community we serve, they can translate the data - may it be trend or the financial performance - to our partners and beneficiaries directly as they were already capacitated on the entire process flow and operations of our program milestone, accomplishments and performance.