What are some of the business challenges business people face? Here are some of them that you will recognize?

⁃       Finding, Retaining, Enhancing talent?
⁃       Growing the business
⁃       Remaining focused
⁃       Carrying out a powerful and positive Change management drive
⁃       IQ-EQ-CQ-SQ synergy
⁃       Creating Efficiency & Effectiveness
⁃       Priority management
⁃       Succession planning
⁃       Identifying and grooming high-performance talent
⁃       Going from being a transactional Leader to being a transformational Leader
⁃       How to create an engaging, empowering and energizing workforce
⁃       Sustaining success
⁃       Creating an ownership mentality in the workforce
⁃       Making staff take 100% responsibility and accountability
⁃       Creating confident staff

Do you realize that all of the above areas can be impacted and enhanced through creating a Mentorship/Menteeship culture in your organization. You can grow your own capacity by being mentees and can enhance the capacity of your teams by being mentors. When you & your team stop growing your business stops growing.

If you feel you are beyond the need of mentoring or being mentored consider the following examples:

•       Oprah Winfrey was mentored by author and poet, the late Maya Angelou.
•       Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs
•       Richard Branson mentored by Sir Freddie Laker
•       Michael Bloomberg by William R. Salomon
•       Warren Buffet was mentored by Benjamin Graham.
•       Henry David Thoreau mentored by Ralph Waldo Emerson
•       Quincy Jones mentored by Musician Ray Charles
•       Colin Powell mentored by his father Luther Powell
•       Mother Teresa mentored by  Father Michael van der Peet.
•       Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg  mentored by Larry Summers

Sun Microsystems compared the career progress of approximately 1,000 employees over a 5-year period and they found significant improvements for both mentors and mentees.

Mentoring another person is one of the greatest gifts you could give them. And there’s almost no better feeling in the world than to help another person accomplish their dreams. There’s an unexplained karma in the world that you get what you give and the more people you mentor the more the rewards come back to you, only multiplied.

It is important to do it right if you are planning to formalize a Mentorship program in your business including:

⁃       Have clarity of the purpose of the program
⁃       Create success metrics
⁃       Clear business objectives
⁃       Align it with the strategic goals of the organization
⁃       Ensure solid mentor/mentee relationships (good constructed matches)