Who needs a business mentor?

Everyone should have a mentor – someone who is not too close to your day to day working situation, with the experience to offer insight and counsel, who can support you with an outsider’s view.  And the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more you need a behind-the-scenes business sensei.  But finding the right mentor isn’t straight forward.  Where one mentor can inspire and motivate, another can treat you like a disappointing pupil.  If your mentor is sharing their words of wisdom for the love of doing it – and the occasional cup of coffee – then they obviously have an instinctive urge to teach.  But, dangerously, they might just have an instinctive urge to hear the sound of their own voice.  Opening up about your working issues and ideas is a revealing exercise and unless you trust that your mentor is genuinely motivated to help, a mentor session can feel more like a TV crime drama grilling than a supportive catch up.

My own mentors found me.  Two are ex-clients who I advised on PR, corporate positioning and communications.  Things changed and we all moved jobs but we stayed in touch.  And our informal meetings changed from chit chats into in-depth discussions about business, management, finance and life.  The focus switched from a two way catch up to a focussed assessment of my business and ‘therapy session’ into my working challenges.  I relish the opportunity to run things by them and often do make decisions with a nod to ‘what would my mentors do’. 

I’d say ‘what’s in it for them?’ if I wasn’t also a mentor myself.  I recognise the satisfaction and reward of sharing knowledge and the feel-good factor of helping someone with some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way.

So if you haven’t got a mentor, then keep your eyes open and try to cultivate one.  The perfect mentor doesn’t prescribe the solution to your business challenges, puff you up in a sycophantic way or reprimand you for getting in tricky situations.  They encourage, advise and illuminate opportunities.  They hold a mirror up and help keep the focus clear.  After a good meeting with a mentor you look in the mirror and like what you see.   

By Lucy George

The Power of Knowledge

This week, the Wordville team had “the satisfaction of taking part” in a client’s general knowledge quiz. I emphasise the aforementioned phrase, as people use it all too regularly to make losers feel better about their poor performance. Well I can tell you, the Wordville team gained no notable satisfaction from taking part. We were in it to win it. Who enters a competition with the aim of not winning? Yes, I’m a bad loser but I’m proud of this; I want to win, I want to be the best. What’s wrong with that?

Later that night, my poor sportsmanship got me thinking. In our team of five – and out of a total of 50 questions – my individual performance left a lot to be desired. Not one to sit quietly, I volunteered answers for many of the questions. However, I was probably individually responsible for a correct answer of about… one? Maybe two at a push. The rest of the team seemed to know considerably more than I did. To further add insult to injury, it turned out my specialist subjects (whales, dolphins and vegetables), had not cropped up once. I was left looking like I knew absolutely nothing.

The team offered their support. ‘We’re just full of useless information’, said Polly and Lucy, who seemed to be the best ‘informed’ of all of us.

Is this knowledge really useless, though?  In the case of the above quiz, it would have been distinctly useful. Knowing Henry VIII’s third wife’s first child’s birthday might not help me out when writing a press release, but who knows when that exact question might crop up? One day such knowledge could win me a million pounds or, in the case of this week’s quiz, infinite workplace glory. The point I’m trying to make is that one day, some situation might present itself, where knowing an obscure, some might say useless fact, could have weighty consequences.

Lucy and Polly are so full of ‘useless facts’ that they would stand a much better chance of answering that million pound question.

The conclusion I have come to is this. The more you know, the more power and advantage you have. As long as you don’t compromise on having useful knowledge, there is no harm in filling your head with useless information too. So, from now on, I am going to absorb everything. From memorising the day’s main news agendas, to Steph’s favourite nail varnish. From Barrack Obama’s policies on human rights, to what direction Pema likes her tea stirred in.

Pub quiz teams all over the country should beware… 

By Jessica Matthias