How to get your team the mentorship they need
In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of mentorship for small agency employees. They explore various approaches including informal and formal mentorships, organic development of mentor-mentee relationships, and bringing in external consultants for mentorship. Gini shares her personal experiences, highlighting the challenges of forced mentorship and the benefits of organically developed relationships. The hosts emphasize the need for managers to support and mentor their employees, leveraging both internal and external resources, and the value of making time to mentor individuals outside one’s own organization. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “Keep in mind that in a really good mentor-mentee relationship, the mentor keeps their mentee’s best interest at heart, even if it’s not the best thing for the organization.” Chip Griffin: “There are a lot of more modern approaches to mentorship because of all the technology and tools that we have available to us. Gini Dietrich: “Being a mentor almost always benefits you in the long run.” Chip Griffin: “There’s this fear, I don’t have time to be a mentor. Make time.” Related Helping your agency’s new managers Managing employees in a small agency Helping agency employees to improve their PR skills View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think I need a mentor to help me through this whole podcasting process. Can you be my mentor? Gini Dietrich: Yes, I would love to. Thank you. Chip Griffin: Excellent. Excellent. So we are going to talk about mentorship today because this is something that I think a lot of small agency owners may realize that their team members need. I mean, they may need it themselves too, but we’re going to focus on it from an employee standpoint. You know, you’ve got, you’ve got employees, you want to try to help them to get to the next level in their careers. But honestly, most owners don’t tend to invest a lot of time in it themselves as far as helping to bring along team members because they’re all caught up in the day to day. And honestly, I think a lot struggle with how do I even do this effectively? And so I’ve seen a lot of different things over the years. I’ve seen forced mentorships in larger agencies where people are like, okay, you five new employees, you’re going to have designated mentors. And so they just assign people. I’ve, I’ve seen ones where people are encouraged to get mentors, but not given any guidance as to how to find them or how does it work? And so I think the, the question really becomes whether it’s a mentor or something similar, how do you help your team members get to where they need to be to, to be that future employee and not just a current employee? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s… They, they’re, I think you made this point somewhere along the line too, but it’s, it’s less, sometimes it’s not formal. Sometimes it really is, you know, for me, I’ve had situations where I’ve been informal mentors to clients. Like especially their, their young professionals on their marketing and comms teams. And where I have found that people look to me as their mentor, whether or not it’s formal is when I’m helping them with professional development and teaching and explaining. And so, you know, lots of one to one meetings or lots of education during meetings or it’s that kind of stuff. Like it’s helping them learn the next step in their job and, and kind of think through their career path. And, and like I said, maybe it’s formal and maybe it’s not, but as agency owners, I think we can think about that. Like how, how we’re best suited and you know, we can’t be a mentor to everybody, a formal mentor to everybody on our teams. But we are best suited to be able to say, okay, your strengths lie here, so I can see