Mentoring and Leadership

Mentoring is a vital leadership skill. It helps you grow personally and professionally. It is an excellent experience mentoring others. The kind of satisfaction you derive is amazing. It broadens your mental horizons, widens the knowledge base and enhances your communication skills and helps in networking. When people grow under your leadership, it gives you immense personal satisfaction. Every individual has a role to cut out to execute in this world. Mentoring is one of them to leave a mark behind in this world.

Mentoring is closely related to leadership. Only tried and tested leaders can be effective mentors as they know how to influence and get the best out of their mentees. They help in aligning the behavior of mentees with their goals. When leaders prove themselves the mentees take a leaf out of it. The mentees get confident from the success of leaders. They look for ropes to succeed.

Leadership provides vision and direction to the organization. Mentorship grooves the mentees with in the vision. Leadership is general and it extends in every area. Mentorship is confined to a specific domain. It provides a specific job related skill. In a nutshell, leadership is a broad area while the mentorship is a narrow area.

Both mentorship and leadership are interwoven. They go together. Every leader has a mentor. Someone has put the ladder either directly or indirectly for the success of every leader. The ladder in this context is mentorship. In the Mahabharata epic, Drona put the ladder to Arjuna directly thus becoming mentor. He put the ladder to Ekalavya indirectly thus becoming mentor in absentia.

Globally legendary leaders like Jack Welch, Bill Gates and Peter F. Drucker laid stress on leadership training. They realized that creating leaders will pave the way for organizational growth. These leaders nurtured leadership, enabled and encouraged empowerment of their employees. That is the secret for their success. It is a fact that only leaders can produce leaders.