Mentoring - An Idea Whose Time Has Come
You can hardly open the business pages of a newspaper these days without reading about the launch of another mentoring scheme. Only the other weekend I found an article about the College Enterprise Scheme designed to encourage undergraduates to consider starting their own business as a career option when they complete their studies, rather than starting the more traditional journey up the corporate ladder. The Government has put £0.5M into the scheme. A student initiative from an Imperial College (London) undergraduate is itself a start-up. The appropriately named business, Student Upstarts, is an enterprise boot camp, which picks promising ventures and puts them through an intensive 13-week mentoring programme. Another scheme launched last year by the Prime Minister, Enterprise First is a two-year programme to encourage and support graduates to start their own businesses by linking them with mentors and funding. Then there’s the New Enterprise Allowance Scheme also launched last year for those on Jobseekers Allowance. This scheme provides a modest weekly payment together with free mentoring and access to a small loan to provide start-up funding.
So what’s going on here? The idea of a mentor is not new. Look in a dictionary, and it defines a mentor as ‘n. a wise counsellor. [Gr. The tutor by whom Telemachus was guided].’ Not being schooled in Greek mythology, I had to look up Telemachus in Wikipedia and found that he was the son of Penelope and Odysseus, who needed a tutor because his father was so often away fighting wars – that’s ancient Greeks for you. Even the X-factor TV show panelists are called, and used as, mentors, whereas 10 years ago they would have been ‘judges’. And almost anyone who’s worked in a large organisation over the last decade will be familiar with in-house mentoring programmes. Even the British Bankers Association has an initiative for high street banks to train mentors as part of project MERLIN, the banking industry’s support for business. This is by the way the least we should expect given the amount of public money spent on bank bailouts over the last few years. I think, quite simply, mentoring is an idea whose time has come. For business, there are several advantages of using a business mentor. It’s generally a low cost option, which is a good place to start in a recession. There’s also a transfer of knowledge and skills to the client because it’s the client who has to take ownership of the analysis, choose the best course of action from the options identified in conjunction with the mentor, then implement their decision. This avoids creating dependency on the mentor and helps the client to stand on their own feet more quickly. For a mentor, there is no finer outcome than talking him or herself out of a job. It should therefore be no surprise that Government sees the provision of business mentors as a key catalyst in nurturing the growth of start-ups and small business, which are so important to grow the new jobs needed to replace shrinking public sector employment, and to get the economy moving again. In addition to Government backed schemes, there are some excellent not for profit business mentoring schemes around, funded by partnerships of local authorities and business organisations. And then there’s the B2B sector, which has a huge variety of mentors, coaches, advisers, consultants and so on. The annual small business survey shows that using external business support does provide a worthwhile positive benefit to business so it’s great news that the availability of business mentoring continues to grow. If you’re reading that and you run a business, a social enterprise or a charity and you don’t have a business mentor, you are missing out on what can be a real game changer. So what are you waiting for? For links to mentoring schemes and organisations, visit the knowledge centre on my website, www.businessmentoringservices.co.uk.