At this festive time of year, we’re all looking to do a little good. For experienced marketers, there’s another great way of giving something back. Mentoring.
For those, like one of our marketing mentors, Pippa, who love being able to help people grow, it’s a rewarding experience. It’s also a great reminder of what knowledge you yourself take for granted. Sometimes we forget how far we’ve come in our careers, and don’t appreciate the full importance of the valuable skills we’ve developed over the course of our lives. In teaching and supporting others, there is so much to learn.
From what we’ve seen, our mentors have had a natural sense of when and where to step in and give actionable advice to help mentees’ work through particular challenges. Letting their mentees take the lead in reaching out to them for advice and additional support, they can also step back and allow their mentee to develop independently after their initial input has got them focused and on track. Pippa is spot on when she advises us that mentoring is a great short term tool, but ‘you have to be careful not to let it become a permanent crutch as a mentee – you have to use it to help you grow confidence in addressing a particular issue/s and then move on’.
At marketingmoves, we’ve begun putting some of our talented senior marketers in touch with our up-and-coming superstars so that they can give latter support in key development areas and put them on a clearer road to success.
We first thought of facilitating mentoring when one of our candidates was told by her line manager to be more strategic in her marketing. She discussed this constructive feedback with us, and we felt that without guidance and support it would be difficult to improve upon this meaningfully and in such a short time frame. We felt an outside, knowledgeable perspective would really help our candidate to make the step from reactive to strategic marketing, so put her in touch with Pippa, who was able to interpret and offer practical advice straight away:
“My interpretation is that she needs to take and communicate a broader marketing perspective, which is challenging given her relative inexperience (she is young!) and PR background, which necessitates a more active role.”
Pippa was immediately able to help in a hands-on way:
“She showed me her annual plan and I was able to see the gap straight away, so I shared my [company] Partner marketing plan with her to give her a flavour of the areas she needs to address. I’m looking forward to seeing how she takes that forward.”
This was a great start to the mentoring process and we too are looking forward to hearing of their progress in the coming year. Watch this space for the continued story – it might even turn into a case study!
If you are a technology marketing contractor looking for your next role or someone looking to hire a new marketing team member on a contract basis, contact Laura Barrett on lbarrett@marketingmoves.com to discuss how we can help you.
