Béatrice Castaing de Longueville & Sarah Haddane - CO VP Mentoring at PWN

The Professional Women Network Career & Leadership Mentoring program, started in 2017 November, found a strong interest. As VPs of this initiative, we have been overwhelmed by applications and struggling to positively answer every demand. Around 70 women are now in a mentoring process, the maximum even reached. It is inretesting to undertand what is behind. 

Raising mentees’ self confidence and career 

Being mentored raise women awareness on their capabilities and behaviors. They gain tips and techniques to reach their objectives, be more confident and make the most of their potential. This experience helps them define the right strategy for their career. When matching the candidates, we were so surprised to have excellent professional doubting on themselves and not daring asking for opportunities, obviously within their reach.

Boosting mentors’ coaching skills and path assessment

Mentors experience a great opportunity to learn how to coach; finding the proper involvement to keep the mentee owner of her decisions and to help her at the same time. Mentors gain powerful skills in professional development and they add it to their leadership competencies. At the same time, they reflect back on their own career. They measure what they achieved and what made it happen. It is a great opportunity to boost mentors confidence and open the box of their next step in career.

Enhancing business knowledge

Discovering other professional environments is also a powerful output. Many women are focused on their own company and tend not to open themselves on other professional realities. It is key to remain innovative, agile and prepared for tomorrow’s challenges.  

Experiencing women solidarity

On the top of it, relationship between mentees and mentors is often very deep and lasts even after the program ends. Experiencing selfless support is strong and demonstrates women solidarity. It reinforces the accuracy of a women network like PWN. Additionally, being part of such a program opens to training and networking. The experience help building a precise development track as the mentee identify the gaps to reach their professional objectives. The personal development workshops offered by the network provide a great opportunity to work on this development track with other members of the network.

Develop networking and transversality in companies

All these reasons pushed major companies to build internal mentoring programs. Some are specific to women like Danone. It supports men/women balance in leadership position, a big issue for companies who want to attract talented women.

Some programs are not women focused. They bring strong value in career development, internal visibility reinforcement and cross functional networking for all involved employees. Building common culture and values is a key challenge for global companies. By creating cross functional groups and opening deep exchanges between people, mentoring is a great lever for transversality. It contributes to mobility throughout business units by creating original links between people. The company @Bacardi for example choosed to make its mentoring program cross boarder and cross department, making it a way to share the same company culture at the international level.

Humanize digital training

Digital distance training tends to develop in many fields and if you practiced Moocs or distance learning yourself, you might have felt lonely behind your keyboard. Again, mentoring can be a great added value supplementary to digital training. @Open Classroom is a great example of using mentoring as a lever of learning. Additionally to their online programs, this company gives trainees the opportunity to be mentored on their experience and outputs. It boosts learning and humanize digital experience. 

Reinforce social links

In our society, we want @so much to be independent that we tend to feel alone facing our choices. Mentoring is a great way of breaking loneliness and reweaving social links. Individuals have the opportunity to create a strong one to one relationship and at the same time, to be part of a strong network.

It works internally in companies, as we mentioned, in professional networks as @PWN, and also in the city and leads to community involvement. Les Mentors dans la Ville experience is a great example. The purpose of this French network, organized in local groups, is to create link between people, cultures and neighborhoods. “Experience can’t be passed on but can be shared” says Laurent Bourdeau, General Manager. The growth of this initiative shows how powerful it is for people and the whole society.

You didn’t experience mentoring yet ? Choose your objectives and network, and try it ! No doubt you will be delighted !