Some of this content first appeared in our informative white paper, Mentoring & Leadership: FAQs, Tips & Real Life Stories. For the full white paper, click here.
Leadership and mentoring. The two go hand-in-hand like peanut butter and jelly, milk and cookies, chips and salsa. (Hungry yet? OK, we’ll stop now.)
It’s easy to accept the idea of this grand partnership because, on the surface, it sounds good. After all, leadership is an important and valued skill, and mentoring is something most people welcome, especially if it will help them advance in their careers.
But do you truly understand the link between leadership and mentoring? What do the individual terms mean, and do these meanings change when you link the two? How does mentoring foster leadership (and is mentoring always necessary)? And what does a “leadership” mentoring program look like anyway?
Let’s pause for a moment to first to “define” leadership and mentoring as they relate to our goal here at Mentoring Complete:
Leadership: In terms of “leadership,” we like the definition Martin M. Chemers uses in his book An Integrative Theory of Leadership. He describes leadership as “a process of social influence in which one person is able to enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task.”
Mentoring: As for mentoring, we define it as a system that promotes and supports professional development by linking a person (the mentoree) with a mentor who will focus on the overall development of that mentoree. Mentoring is transformational for the mentoree and, quite often, the mentor.
So in this blog post, we’d like to share with you some statistics, quotes and (most importantly) resources to use and to share with your co-workers and with your C-Suite regarding the relationship between leadership and mentoring. We do believe that the two go hand in hand and that mentoring can have a major impact on building great leaders, and therefore, affecting the bottom line.
Compelling Statistics, Findings and Quotes:
1. 10 Inspirational Quotes from Women Business Leaders – Entrepreneur put together this list of incredibly inspirational quotes from female entrepreneurs who have carried the torch of leadership. Our favorite from Lori Greiner, inventor, QVC host and ‘Shark Tank’ investor:
“Dear optimist, pessimist, and realist — while you guys were busy arguing about the glass of wine, I drank it! Sincerely, the opportunist!”
2. More and more companies (nearly 60% according to this survey) are reporting a shortage of qualified leadership talent.
3. “Leaders hold the key to employee engagement”—from Aon Hewitt’s 2014 Trends in Global Engagement Report
4. “69% of business leaders say it’s important to have a mentor”—from Entrepreneur
5. “The difference between the impact that a top-performing leader and an average leader has on an organization is at least 50 percent, according to leaders participating in Global Leadership Forecast 2011.”
6. “Leadership development cannot be left to chance”—from the Center for Creative Leadership’s white paper titled ”Grooming Top Leaders: Cultural Perspectives from China, India, Singapore, and the United States”
Mentoring Complete’s Helpful Resources
7. Leadership & Mentoring White Paper– In this free white paper we provide:
- Compelling statistics about corporate leadership and mentoring
- The link between leadership and mentoring
- Explanations regarding the two main types of leadership
- An answer to the question “what’s a leadership mentoring program”?
- Quotes from real people who’ve experienced the power of mentoring when it’s used to foster leadership skills
8. Act Like a Leader: Help Others Succeed. Build Strategic Alliances. Know Yourself. – “Focus on making others successful.” This one sentence sums up the importance of combining leadership and mentoring.
9. The Global Leadership Forecast 2014/2015 – “Only 59 percent of HR leaders indicated that their organization has a mentoring/ coaching program specifically designed to address high potentials’ unique needs. Yet, when asked what development practices most affected leadership development quality, high-potential leaders selected mentoring by a significant margin. HR groups need to address this disconnect between two very important organizational constituencies.”
10. Lessons From Bringing out the Best in Others–The Leadership Freak, aka Dan Rockwell, has some great insights into leadership and its important role in the workplace. We like this article because of its simplicity relating to why people don’t always ask for advice. A mentoring program could alleviate the need to “ask.”
So there you have it. Leadership and Mentoring do in fact, go hand in hand. Do you have any other stories about leadership and mentoring? We’d love to hear them in the comments below! Also, feel free to download our free white paper.