Is eMentoring your key to success?
Having a mentor can be a useful way of helping you achieve your professional goals. Phil Young explains how the mentoring sector is evolving.
Mentoring can be traced back to Greek mythology wherein Mentor, who was a loyal friend and adviser to Odysseus, king of Ithaca, helped raise Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, while Odysseus was away fighting the Trojan War. Mentor became Telemachus’ teacher, coach, counsellor and protector.
Having delved into the origins and evolution of mentoring I find it interesting that despite the thousands of years of history there remains a deal of confusion and divide around what mentoring is, or should be.
“A business owner can achieve a years’ worth of goals in three months” says Australian lifestyle coach and mentor Andrew Roberts, “when they employ the services of a paid mentor”. And interestingly, he observes that “As soon as it becomes a paid transaction, the mentoring becomes a lot more focused, serious and organised and, I think, there is a lot more chance of success”.
The traditionalists promote that: Mentors only provide their services face to face; mentoring should be premised on establishing a long-term trusted relationship; and the service should be provided for free. It’s a successful, valuable and proven service, though I do feel that some of the ardent traditionalists could be more accepting of evolving mentoring trends.
eMentoring evolution
Over the past few decades a respected and successful profession has emerged where mentors and their clients successfully engage without ever meeting face-to-face; the support may only be for a short period of time supporting achievement of a specific outcome; and mentors get paid for their service. And why not charge a fee? After all, it is highly unlikely that the original Mentor went unrewarded for his services to the young prince!
eMentoring can be described as the provision of mentoring based services, either partially or fully, by electronic means. My personal view is that eMentoring based engagements will achieve the best outcomes when the engagement is premised on achieving a specified outcome.
Supporting and perhaps promoting the evolution of eMentoring is the reality that most entrepreneurs and inventors are in a hurry to achieve success. They would rather engage the specific support they need when they need it rather than undertake several years of study. By way of example, an inventor looking for assistance with the design of a switch would most likely engage an electrical engineer ahead of enrolling in a course.
Dr Hilary Armstrong, director of education at the US Institute of Executive Coaching observed, “People seem to value (Mentors) more, particularly if they are short-term relationships, (and) if they are paying for them.”
For me, this is a particularly interesting observation, highlighting that mentoring is no longer just based on long term, face-to-face relationships. Engagements can be short term with specific, stated objectives and they can be fee based.
I spoke to numerous professional mentors and mentees on the reasons for engagement successes and failures. A lack of process was often seen as the reason why many engagements failed: timelines dragged out; discussions took tangents irrelevant to the topic; mentors were distracted by other priorities; and, mentees lacked commitment.
In my view it is difficult to apply discipline and structure to a free service. As Dr Armstrong observed, the charging of a fee changes the dynamics dramatically. In effect, the charging of a fee defines the engagement as professional with all the connotations, rights and expectations that engaging someone on a professional basis implies. To me, the key to mentoring success, short or long term, is the application of process where both parties agree up front on the goals and then monitor their progress during the course of the engagement.
And the best way to ensure commitment from both parties is the incorporation of a fee. I would like to emphasise that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the mentor gets paid. The best mentor I ever had, required a payment to his favoured charity and, by the way, I never met him face-to-face.
eMentoring career opportunity
Politicians and economists frequently express concern over the socio-economic burden of the baby boomer generation. Yet many of the baby boomers would be more than happy to earn an income / be self-sufficient but can’t do so under traditional employment regimes. Yet these are the most experienced and often most skilled people we have – what a waste!
Fortunately, the modern employment landscape is changing: peopleperhour.com predicts that 1 in 2 people will work in a freelance capacity by 2020; and, that this “explosive growth” will be underpinned by the burgeoning mobile industry. eMentoring is part of this employment evolution; creating the opportunity for baby boomers to generate additional income whilst giving enthusiastic entrepreneurs, inventors and career professionals access to this huge and under utilised resource.
And people are prepared to pay!
The US self-help education sector is worth over $11 billion dollars per annum and mentoring is one of the fastest growing niches. Fees range from $30 per hour up to $900 for senior mentors.
While the barriers to entry to becoming an eMentor are relatively low, people should not jump into the profession without serious self-analysis of their own character and commitment. A mentor can be a significant influence on another person’s life, both positive and negative. It is a highly responsible position.
The personal and financial rewards can be substantial for those who are committed to the mentoring profession but it has to be remembered at all times that being a mentor is a position of trust and you owe it to your clients to be the best you can be so they can be the best they can be.
Phil Young is the author of Successful eMentor, a series of guides that have been developed for those looking to either set up a Mentoring practice or mentees looking to obtain success from mentoring engagements. Phil has had a long career in process improvement with roles ranging from senior auditor through senior diplomat to a successful career in selling and implementing process automation software. As a senior manager he managed large teams and took on the role of mentor for company staff before taking early retirement to focus on his passion for woodturning.
Sara Brown
August 4, 2015 at 12:38 pm
Mentoring students
I think a good way to mentor students is online. It is cost effective and time saving with the availability of teachers anytime of the day.