SPECIAL GUEST BLOG By Tony Ritchie, Management Mentor, Mentors.ie
Many people throughout Ireland are looking to set-up a successful company or business. Some simply want to find methods of operating their current business that have been proven. Mentors.ie is one of the best offerings when it comes to the corporate governance of businesses. It utilizes the idea of a mentor in this process. Mentors have long been valuable resources when it comes to one’s personal life and professional life.
Mentors.ie pushes this concept to the next level. Through its staff of experienced and qualified individuals they offer businesses everything that they need to succeed. The staff is composed of veteran executives and non-executives. Each brings their own experience in the corporate world to the table. Through the use of their experience business owners are able to better organize their businesses.
Mentors Fill Roles
Mentors can be used to fill a number of roles for businesses. They can function as Chairpersons, Non-Executive Directors, Consultants and more. Your board will require diversity in order to function properly. Mentor.ie has this diversity when it comes to filling your roles.
Mentors Share Expertise
You will discover that the mentors at Mentor.ie are equipped with a lot of expertise. They have experience dealing with a variety of issues. This expertise can be put to good use in your business. Businesses will have access to this knowledge when it comes to strategy goals. Defining strategy or re-defining it will play a role in the ultimate success and performance of your business.
Mentors Face Challenges
One very important thing that mentors provide is assistance when challenges arise. There will be challenges at times that must be dealt with. Mentor.ie applies an approach that has worked well in many industries. Looking at business, people, sales, operations, and strategy is a good approach to effectively starting your business.
Mentors.ie is one of the most unique approaches to use when starting a business. The resources offered here are proven to succeed. Having help to plan a winning strategy, you will help you see a transformation in your business operations. Mentors offer a variety of expertise that will apply to your own business model.
David Parkinson, HR Mentor at Mentors.ie talks about why mentoring is so important for SME businesses, and how his 40 years experience at the executive level in HR offers a solid sounding board to Mentors.ie clients.
A SME business owner asked me the other day “What’s the difference between a business mentor and a business coach?” It took me a bit of thinking to come up with a good analogy to explain the difference, until it occurred to me that nowhere is there a better illustration of the difference between mentors and coaches than in a school environment.
Think of your football or rugby coach – one who was a sports-loving motivator who somehow managed to pull the best from the team by swinging wildly from censure to praise – “You’re awful! We’ll never win with that kind of effort!” to “Alright, team; we’re going to win this. We’re better than them.” Hate them during training and love them for games, but the message from him was almost always a barking order or call-to-action that left us scrambling to comply, without always knowing why it was we were complying. Your coach was someone you wanted to obey, whom we wanted to show us the path to winning.
Your mentor, on the other hand, is a contemplative person with limitless enjoyment of his work and unending insight, seasoned with decades of experience. Rarely does he ever give an order, and often turns out a thought-provoking question. “Have you thought of…?” and “Have you considered…?” are the most common starts to conversations and you invariably find yourself thinking about questions as you walk away. They understood the background and how you operate in day-to-day life and their comments spur you on to create your own goals, your own solutions, and your own path to achieve them, building skills which you can apply to your immediate problems and carry with you to tackle future challenges. Your mentor is someone you want to be like; someone whose success and acumen you hope to achieve.
Business coaches and business mentors have the same goal – they want you to succeed. Their methods vary, however. Often business coaches are the ones who say “Follow these steps, do this and that to achieve your goal”. Business mentors, on the other hand. say “I have the experience, you have the drive; let’s put them together to achieve your goal and make you into a better business person for the future”.
Ultimately, leading a SME isn’t a team effort – it’s an individual one. There’s a place for both business coaches and business mentors, but if you are the man or woman at the top, a Mentor is the person you want by your side.
