So Why is Mentorship Important Anyway?
“To grow as a person and as a professional, you must have a mentor” is a phrase I heard from the Director of Operations at the startup I worked at fresh out of college. I would hear this phrase over and over again in different settings, from different people. At face value, it made sense — having someone show and advise you would make things clearer for you to make better life and career choices. But like other sensible phrases in life, “eat healthily”, “exercise”, “sleep for at least eight hours every day”, I needed to understand the tangible results of having a mentor. As years have gone by and I have had first-hand experience being both a mentor and a mentee, I started seeing the results. But I also needed to zoom out and understand what mentorship can do in the grand scheme of things. Here are a few findings that paint a good picture of that.
In a 2007 mentorship study conducted by the Warrington College of Business Administration and quoted by the Harvard Business Review, researchers ran a quantitative analysis to test over 25 years of qualitative research and observations that claimed that mentorship has a positive effect on professional career development. The good news is that “results demonstrate that mentoring does have substantial effects on job and career satisfaction after holding these covariates constant […].” It’s important to note that mentorship is just one of the elements that can help boost your career outcomes. The study does highlight that there are other elements such as career tenure, education, and even background — which includes gender, race, and core self-evaluation (more on this in a future post). As noted previously, mentors are guides, at the end of the day, the mentee is the one who does the leg work and ultimately makes a choice.
All that being said, the study did recognize that people who have one or more mentors have an increased chance of receiving a promotion, a salary increase, and have an increased general job/career satisfaction. This is the result of two areas of support: functional and psychosocial. While the former points to enriching the mentee’s hard skills and amplifying their network, the latter focuses on counseling and alleviating anxieties (addressing imposter syndrome might be a good example of this).
Mentorship has an impact across the board, from high-achieving professionals — heads of state and CEOs — to entrepreneurs in developing countries. The World Bank shared how programs like MicroMentor, an online mentoring platform that connects entrepreneurs with skilled business mentors around the globe, estimates that “mentored entrepreneurs create twice as many new jobs as solo entrepreneurs” which translates to about 3.24 jobs created per mentor, and “increase individual revenue by $18,000, and improve their skills by three to five times more than those who did not receive mentoring.”
To put it another way, a mentor shares knowledge and experience with mentees so that mentees don’t have to recreate the wheel. That is in fact the very element that has set us apart from other species — we have built a civilization by passing on knowledge through generations via books (that as of 2010, Google estimated that there were close to 130 million books in the world) and mentorship.
So why is mentorship important? So that we can continue building for ourselves, our families, and for our species. We stand on the shoulders of generations before us, and those who come after us will stand on ours.
