3 ways in which mentoring is changing nowadays

You might have noticed that mentoring is all the range nowadays. From LinkedIn adding the “Career Advice” feature, to Facebook adding mentoring as a feature to groups, to less high profile examples — barely a week goes by that you see another headline about how great mentoring is and why you should immediately get a mentor.

And that’s because mentoring can indeed deliver fantastic benefits, both to the mentee and to the mentor. While mentoring used to be reserved to those lucky enough to find a mentor through a naturally evolving relationship or through a corporate program, nowadays mentoring is becoming more and more mainstream.

A bit of history of mentoring and a broad definition of a mentor

Mentoring is in no way an invention of our modern times. Actually, it’s been around for thousands of years: the word “mentor” originates from Homer’s “The Odyssey”, written around 800 BC. But, like pretty much everything else about the world we live in, mentoring has also changed a lot in the past few thousand years.

In a broad sense, a mentor is someone with significant knowledge and experience, who advises and guides a less experienced person.

In the professional world, the concept of a mentor as we know it today has been around for a few decades. In a broad sense, a mentor is someone with significant knowledge and experience, who advises and guides a less experienced person. Most often, this guidance occurs in a professional context, and the mentor provides career advice, support in difficult decisions, a sounding board, objective feedback, and a lot more to the mentee.

Ok… And what’s happening now?

The main change that is happening right now — and, in my opinion, will continue happening — is that the definition of mentoring is becoming looser and looser. The reaction I get most often when I ask someone if they’ve ever had a mentor is “it depends on what you mean by that”. And indeed, it could mean a lot of different things.

The definition of mentoring is becoming looser and looser.

So here are the changes that I’m seeing:

Change no. 1: Mentoring is becoming more and more flexible.

While mentoring used to mean a long-term relationship, usually over at least a year and often longer, with a set frequency of in-person meetings between an older mentor and a younger mentee, the term “mentoring” is now used in a much broader context:

• people talk about their “virtual mentors” to mean someone they’ve never met, but whose work they follow;
• a person might call someone a “mentor” with whom they only had one discussion, but who has provided them essential advice for their career;
• an older executive might be mentored by a younger professional on, for instance, digitalization or how to engage millennials at work.

Essentially, mentoring is about passing on knowledge and life lessons to someone less experienced.

Change no. 2: Mentoring programs need to enable rather than control mentoring relationships.

Companies, professional associations, and interest groups often offer mentoring programs to their employees or members, but the essential benefit offered is in connecting mentor and mentee, and not in a set-in-stone process for how the mentoring should proceed. As with many of the service offers nowadays, the real value is in connecting the right people.

The real value is in connecting the right people.

Change no. 3: Mentoring is not a nice-to-have anymore, but a must-have for companies that want to stay relevant.

71% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs (according to this article). Scientific studies have shown again and again that mentoring improves employee engagement and retention, not to mention its more obvious benefits of promoting knowledge sharing, bringing people together across departments, geographic locations, cultures, and so on.

So what’s the conclusion?

Mentoring is even more relevant now than it used to be. It’s becoming increasingly clear that, in order to build the career you want, you need to learn from people with more experience. Whether you call these people mentors, coaches, advisors or something else, is not important.

While it’s already great to have one mentor, it’s even better to have several.

Another recent shift has been the realization that, while it’s already great to have a mentor, it’s even better to have several. There are lots of great resources on how to choose a mentor (for instance, this, this, and this) — and we’re also here to help.

Finally, if you’re a decision maker in a company, give your employees the possibility to be mentored, whether through an internal program or by facilitating them access to external mentors. The benefits, for all sides, are huge.