If a mentor is a guide who can help someone else in business to find the right direction, then their services are almost certainly in particular demand right now, and not just among young entrepreneurs. All directors and senior managers welcome extra encouragement, insight, experience and understanding, especially during a recession.
Yet according to research commissioned by the Mowgli Foundation—a not-for-profit mentoring organisation—although 83 per cent of senior decision-makers think that mentoring is important to the development of key staff, and 88 per cent believe it to be important to the future success of their organisation, just 38 per cent provide mentoring programmes.
The research suggests that companies are reluctant to invest in training programmes or CSR initiatives at the moment (just 33 per cent of the senior management or board members surveyed thought CSR was important to staff retention, development and motivation).
Yet Simon Edwards, the social entrepreneur who set up the Mowgli Foundation with Tony Bury, a serial entrepreneur, maintains that mentoring is a great leadership development tool for directors and employees, which also has the potential to boost morale and job satisfaction—and change lives.
A trustee of Believe, the charity Edwards set up to inspire change among the socially excluded, introduced him to Bury. Both say that mentoring has had an influential impact on their working lives and it was an obvious area for them to move into. Edwards had worked extensively with the disadvantaged young, including youth offenders, and felt that entrepreneurship was "a good way out of poverty".
And Bury saw mentoring entrepreneurs in developing countries as a great way of helping them to ultimately stand on their own two feet, as well as an opportunity for him to "give back" to society. While the current focus is in the Middle East, it's their aspiration to work in this country too, once the foundation is established.
The Mowgli Foundation chose Jordan for its pilot project for a number of reasons, as Edwards explains: "There's a huge challenge in the Middle East in terms of creating jobs. I think they've got to create 80 million jobs in the region over the next 10 years because of the growth in their population. You can see the threat if the young people aren't engaged, given the politics in that region."
He says there is also a big drive in Jordan "from the King downwards" to promote entrepreneurship. "That has spilled out into Palestine, where again entrepreneurship is seen as a key ingredient in the peace process out there."
Because Mowgli mentors are trained to work with entrepreneurs in a different cultural and business environment, Edwards claims they reap as much benefit as their mentees. "What we're discovering is our mentors are actually getting far more out of it in terms of their different view of the world," he says. "Because we get very obsessed with our own little worlds, what this offers is an opportunity to step outside that and view it through the eyes of somebody else in a different culture who's probably facing very similar challenges, just in a different setting." It's an altogether holistic experience, says Edwards.
While Bury provided the initial seed funding to get the project off the ground, Edwards says the charity will be actively seeking further investment to keep itself "entrepreneurial and business-like". He explains: "We're looking for company sponsorship from within the Middle East, because there is money in the Gulf, which we're hoping to divert a little bit of to help the less prosperous parts of the region. But we're also offering this mentoring experience as a package that companies might be prepared to invest in. That way we can make ourselves financially sustainable, rather than having to go out and plead for money the whole time, which is the lot of many charities."
They've launched at a time when there's a lot of navel gazing about the way we do business and how we might use globalisation to build more sustainable economies. There's a buzz about passing on skills and knowledge to inspire others. The Mowgli Foundation's goal is to create a pool of 100 mentors by the end of 2010. It will be those directors who feel they're ready to go out there and make a difference and perhaps further develop their own potential, too.
Posted 29 July 2009 : Director.co.uk
