Mentoring is widely lauded for the benefits it can provide to mentees, but new research from Concordia University reminds us that it also brings significant benefits to mentors too. The authors highlight that whereas the traditional view of mentoring has meant that most attention has been given to the mentee rather than the mentor.
The research set out to explore whether mentors benefit in terms of their leadership skills from having a mentee. The authors hypothesize that while much of leadership training takes place in a classroom or other official setting, mentoring can provide valuable hands-on experience in everything from communication to problem-solving.
Mentors exist to try and help their mentees tackle problems and have to communicate across a wide range of topics with them while also using their emotional intelligence to encourage, influence, and motivate them. The research highlights how these are all valuable leadership skills that mentoring helps the mentor to practice.
Practicing leadership
The researchers monitored an eight-month mentoring program for Ph.D. students. The mentors were quizzed four times throughout the program to understand both how much they identified as leaders and also the confidence they would have in leading a team.
This was followed up by measurements taken at the end of the program to understand the full extent of the mentoring support provided to each mentee. This allowed the researchers to understand the relationship between the mentoring and any boost to the leadership capabilities of the mentors.
The results suggest that the more mentors actually provided mentoring support, the more they saw themselves as leaders. What’s more, they also gained confidence in their leadership capabilities. As such, the researchers believe that mentoring can be a crucial tool in improving the leadership capabilities of people, especially if they haven’t yet received any practical leadership experience.
They highlight that it can often be difficult to attract mentors to programs, so if the leadership development aspect can be highlighted, it can help to create some truly win-win scenarios.
