How a Good Mentor Can Change the Trajectory of Your Business — and Make You Happier at Work | Entrepreneur

Whether you’re starting a new phase in your professional journey or reflecting on decades of experiences, mentorship is critical to thriving in your career. Mentors inspire new talent to hone their unique skill set and capitalize on opportunity. As a professional grows, the former mentee becomes a mentor themselves, shaped by the guides who first led the way. Here are four reasons why mentorship can provide holistic rewards for you, your teams and work.

Developing skills

As experts across a variety of vocations, mentors bring a plethora of experiences to junior colleagues and their organizations. Mentor value is truly far-reaching. According to a CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Survey, 91% of people with mentors are satisfied with their jobs, and 71% of employees with a mentor say their company provides them with quality opportunities to advance their careers, compared to 47% of those without a mentor.

One of the many benefits of mentorship is tailored skill-building. Through their extensive industry knowledge, leaders can:

• Counsel improvement areas by sharing specialized knowledge and best practices specific to the needs of their mentee.
• Offer relationship-building advice and strategies.
• Instill a continuous learning mindset for career-long growth.
• Model soft skills such as leadership behaviors and successful verbal and written communication tactics.
• Share real-world examples to help their colleague navigate current situations with context.

Mentorship presents a mutually beneficial relationship for the mentor as well, allowing them to engage and understand emerging technologies, generational differences and unique perspectives.

Related: I Mentor First-Time Entrepreneurs — These Are the 4 Unseen Benefits I Gained By Giving Back

Navigating challenges

Challenges are inevitable, and how leaders rise to help their teams meet them can mean the difference between near-sure success or inevitable disaster. For leaders who have “been around the block” and seen the rise and fall of their industry, drawing on those experiences can prove instrumental in these situations. In other instances, engaging a novel approach and “unsticking” from past ways of thinking may be what your team needs.

In my own work, an unexpected situation once required me to think outside existing protocols as a mentor. I was tasked with leading a new group, but found that past ways of thinking and programs were actually preventing us from moving forward. I also learned that each member of my team had their own barriers that prevented them from achieving success. Rather than sticking to the original plan, I realized we needed to free ourselves and try new guidelines that addressed each person’s skills as well as their misfires. Being there as a mentor and working through individual needs helped the group redefine the structure we needed. This decision grounded all of us in a key learning that can apply beyond the workplace: Move beyond to find what prevails.

Networking

Much like skills, industry connections from a mentorship relationship take a mentee’s potential one step further. Speeches from high school valedictorians, celebrities, Nobel laureates, award winners, athletes, C-suite leaders and the like often acknowledge how mentorship opened life-altering doors. And for mentees of backgrounds and experience levels different from the predominant ones of their industry, networking can be especially significant.

In the small business landscape, mentorship can offer profitable pathways to new suppliers, client referrals and cross-industry partners. More broadly, new connections help businesses become better ingrained in their local communities and the causes their customers care about. Mentorship also reminds the mentee that their entrepreneurial journey is a networking haven of resources, connections and opportunities rather than a “go it alone” venture. Networking is a sounding board and support system of mentorship.

Related: Everyone Needs a Mentor — But Being a Mentor Is Just as Important. Here’s Why.

Passing it on

One of the great things when it comes to organized mentorship programs is the far-reaching joy across generations of mentor and mentee. An example that comes to mind is our annual The UPS Store Small Biz Challenge, a multistage competition that offers a chance for small business owners to compete for a share of the $35,000 prize pool, an editorial feature and one-on-one mentoring with a small business expert. Being a small business owner or entrepreneur amid an evolving landscape can feel intimidating by nature, which is why The UPS Store supports small business owners by providing resources to help them grow, thrive and reach their entrepreneurial dreams.

This year’s Small Biz Challenge winners, Sydney Attis and Mikayla Garcia, owners of Just Call Me Shirley, epitomize the spirit we see in all our applicants. Emerging from their victory, their mentorship lessons and challenges overcome have shaped new opportunities for them to help fellow entrepreneurs and business owners be unstoppable.

Regardless of the career stage or industry, mentorship has a role in all of them. It brings people together and boosts business development on the micro level. Simple setups, such as biweekly meetings, coffee chats or even happy hours, provide a space for these conversations. This time can become a natural part of your and your team’s work culture. With its many upstream and downstream benefits, consider incorporating mentorship when growing your business.