The Value of a Mentor

Written by the Ye! Team

Mentorship plays a key role in the journey of an entrepreneur - young or old. In fact, it plays a key role for most successful professionals. Speak to any number of C-Suite executives, ground-breaking innovators or star athletes and chances are they have worked with a mentor or a coach along the way. That’s right, think of your idol or your role model and its likely that they received support and guidance in achieving the success they have today. Here is a statistic for you, 70% of successful entrepreneurs and executives have worked with a mentor at some point in their career. Believe us now…?

For young innovators and entrepreneurs, this type of support is even more crucial as many lack the experiences or knowledge to handle tough situations or rely on past and learned experiences to navigate turbulent times. That’s where the support of a mentor can come in handy.

At Ye! Community, we know the importance of mentorship in supporting the social and business acumen of youth entrepreneurs. That’s why we support a number of initiatives to better connect the experts on our platform to youth entrepreneurs as well as suppporting peers to mentor one another!

But before we delve into how you can work with a mentor, let’s take a step back and analyse what mentorship is.

What is mentorship

Mentorship is guidance or support for someone who has professional or personal experience in an area where you require guidance. According to the Oxford Languages, mentorship is "the guidance provided by a mentor, especially an experienced person in a company or educational institution." Mentors provide general support to individuals, helping them see the light through the dark and to provide an open space for dialogue and discussion; to help individual persevere in the face of difficulty. A mentor is a north star, a sounding board, a spiritual guide, and someone who can impart knowledge in others.

To be quite honest, anyone can be a mentor. In fact, in our mentorship podcase, Mentorwise, many of our mentors and mentees explain that some of the best mentors are people similar in age and life experience, so don’t let stereotypes fool you, mentors come in many shapes and sizes.

So, what’s important for you to know when working with a mentor? You must be ready to learn, be honest, and authentic, and share. Be honest with yourself about what you don’t know, what you don't know you don’t know, and come to the table with your ears and eyes open.

Some people choose to work with many mentors at the same time. Some people work with one mentor for short intensive stints of time. Some people have just one mentor for a long, long time. The way you build the relationship is up to you and your mentor. There is no right or wrong way to receive or give mentorship. The thing that matters most is that both parties are committed to the relationship and respect the time and guidance of the other.

Just like with any relationship, trust, respect, and communication are key in developing strong mentorship relationships that can stand the test of time and serve both parties in a meaningful way. To build a mentor relationship that works, its important to communicate about the duration, regularity, medium and tools you will use to connect. We recommend it is the mentee who establishes this framework; however, mentors can also take a leading role here.

In addition, tools and action-oriented goal setting can help give the relationship tangible milestones and actions to achieve. This can help set the pace for the relationship to ensure it is progressing and that each party is working in harmony on shared goals.

At Ye! Community, we have tools that can help you to set parameters around your objectives, establish timelines, and goals. Tap into these here. We recommend setting up SMART Goals - Specific, Measurable, Achieveable, Relevant, Time-Bound. To learn more about how to setup your SMART Goals, checkout this article.

Why mentorship matters

Many youth entrepreneurs lack role models and relationships with adults who they fee comfortable speaking openly about their struggles and their shortcomings - especially in business. A mentor can serve as a sounding board - a way to air these issues out. A mentor can be a shoulder to lean on or a sounding board to help a youth entrepreneur speak through issues, play our scenarios, discuss areas where they feel ill equipped or vulnerable, and thus help a young person grow and mature in themselves, while also learning valuable lessons in the process.

Acting as a mentor can sometimes be comparable to acting as a guide. For many young people, they have few people they can turn to who can help them develop important resilience in tough times, speak openly with, and build trust. Having just such a person in their lives can help young people develop into socially and economically competent adults.

What can I cover in a mentoring relationship?

Mentoring relationships can cover a wide breadth of topics, from dealing with human resource issues to establishing strong internal business processes, depending on the expertise of the mentor and the desire for growth of the mentee, the relationship can cover various topics.

Before diving into the specifics of what themes the relationship will seek to cover and work on, it is most important to get to know one another first and to learn where each individual’s strengths and weaknesses are. We always recommend a first ‘introductory call’ free of constraints to just talk. This allows each party to feel the other out and learn about one another with no rules or strings attached to the conversation.

After this initial conversation, we recommend the mentee lay out the key learning goals that he or she would like to achieve based on the experience of the mentor and his or her areas of expertise. Once again, coming to the table with an open mind and heart helps here. There is so much we can learn from one another. At the early stages of the mentoring relationship, its about understanding where those touchpoints are and then developing a plan of action or milestones accordingly. See our template (shared above) and use SMART goals to do so.

Now, with that said, relationships don’t always work out. A mentor or a mentee can both decide that the relationship is not serving them or is not what they are looking for at that point in time. Furthermore, after time, mentors and mentees can outgrow one another. Once again, we recommend listening to this episode of Mentorwise to learn more. If the relationship doesn't work out, the most important thing is not to take things personally, these things happen and its important to handle the closure of a mentor relationship or the decision not to proceed with one, with respect and good communication, just like we discussed above.

How you can become a mentor with Ye! Community

Ye! Community has a number of ways that you can become a mentor including our Ye! Coffee Roulette initiative, our open community platform, whereby mentors and mentees can connect autonomously, direct matching, or by participating in our Ye! Masterclasses. Each of these options has their own value. Below we break each down in more detail.

Ye! Coffee Roulette: Using technology, we foster unique and unforeseen matches for roulette styles pairings with the Ye! Coffee Roulette initiative. Here we role the proverbial dice to see who you will connect with for 3-months. Our platform uses three simple criteria: Ye! members type, sector, and interest vs. expertise to connect mentors and mentees as well as peer-to-peer for matches that may never have happened otherwise.

Using a drop-in, drop-out model, mentors and mentees can choose to opt-in for one round, and opt-out for others when they are too busy. Every three months they are invited again and the roulette wheel is spun again! Register for the next round before 27 June to see who you will be connected with. The next matches are made on the 27 June 2022.

Ye! Community Platform: Create your profile here and list yourself as a mentor and share on our Ye! Community live feed that you are open for connections to solicit the attention of young entrepreneurs on the platform. Or search the community and reach out to profiles you are interested in. It’s that simple to build a new relationship!

Direct matching: As a mentor on Ye! Community, you can reach out to us, the community managers, to share your profile and the type of profiles you are interested in connecting with and we can provide some options to you for direct matching. We can play the matchmakers and facilitate an email linkage, or we can let you reach out yourself. Connect with us at [email protected]

Ye! Masterclasses: Designed in to support both mentors and mentees with critical skills, we host Mentor Masterclasses and Advanced Entrepreneur Masterclasses once every other month to enhance access to your skillset and teach other mentors how to be well… better mentors. Once again, reach out to us at [email protected] if you are interested in hosting a Masterclass.

Now, that we have explained all about the importance of mentorship, the only thing left is to reach out! There are so many great stories of mentors and mentees on Ye! Community, the only thing stopping you from building such a story is yourself! Reach out today to grow your skills or make a difference in a young person’s life. It’s up to you!