By JC Abusaid, CEO/President as Featured in Forbes
The benefits of mentoring are far-reaching—including motivating people to build their careers with your company while fully realizing their potential to contribute to its success.
We launched our wealth advisory firm’s program about eight years ago. Starting small, we were wowed from the start by how it helped our newer associates dig into their responsibilities, seek new opportunities, address challenges and gain traction in their roles. Since then, it has grown incrementally, evolving into a core investment of time and energy. Today, I see our mentor-mentee relationships as huge contributors to our growth and dynamic culture.
If you have a high degree of conviction that your associates make your company, think of a mentoring program as a means to greater cultural alignment, cracking through impediments to growth and supercharging your financial organization’s long-range goals.
The Benefits
Mentorships can help new hires embed themselves into your company’s culture, “get” your business strategy and get up to speed more quickly. Management can more readily confirm whether individuals are a good fit for their role and the organization.
These benefits extend beyond new employees; they are also critical for associates going through a promotion or job change. Among a range of job contentment data related to mentorships, this CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey found that over 90% of employees who had a mentor reported satisfaction with their jobs. Of the employees without a mentor, over 40% had recently considered quitting.
Our mentor program has been so successful for us that participation is mandatory for everyone we hire. Here are some of the benefits we’ve experienced:
- The program accelerates each individual’s understanding of the firm’s culture, operations and strategy. People integrate more efficiently and are more effective in their roles. They’re able to appreciate the part they play in moving the needle toward organizational goals.
- Mentoring accelerates solutions. When something isn’t working, it gets identified more readily. For example, through the program, we’ve been able to identify associates who weren’t in the right role to fully draw on their talents. Without the feedback and guidance of a mentor, these kinds of mismatches would likely get noticed—eventually. But you might end up losing good people along the way.
- Mentorship fosters a sense of belonging and support within the organization. We strongly believe that it contributes to the adhesiveness of our culture and is a significant factor in inducing our people to stay and grow with us.
- The program encourages dialogue, knowledge sharing and personal growth within the organization. Benefits for mentors include the perspectives and skill sets that younger, more inquisitive—and in general, more tech-savvy—mentees share.
