Mentoring entrepreneurs
Mentee-Group meetings with a resource person (20 times a year with a Designated Supervising Mentor per group meeting), Group retreat or Values formation sessions (12 times a year), Appreciation events and Feedback sessions and Field trips to Mentor’s or Guest Speaker’s operations. Venues identified are either the Mentor’s or Resource Person’s premises for Group meetings, the Mentor’s office for One-onOnes or the 25th floor of the Ayala Tower.
This program can benefit from the learning’s of the MASIKAP project. To ensure successful communication between the Mentee and the Mentor, it is important that a common field of experience should be established. In the MASIKAP project, the students and fresh graduates had to look at the Mentee’s cultural, business and life background to identify areas of common experience where communications and trust could begin. The challenge was to avoid having the Mentor “lecturing’ down at the Mentee or coming up with analysis and recommendations far from the actual situation of the Mentee. As I look over the MAP mentors, I noted that all come from the executive levels of business, industry and the academe and they will have to exert extra effort to ensure that good communication occurs. While having meetings in Mentors’ office or premises will be convenient for the Mentors, it may be better to have them in familiar places where the Mentees can feel comfortable or in establishments that will be the kind of business the Mentees are intending to set up.
The availability of the Mentors is also important. Business mentoring cannot be fully planned for and the Mentors should make it their first priority to respond to expressed needs of the Mentees. Otherwise, the trust of the Mentees in their Mentors may be eroded.
In my years of experience as Director of the UP Institute of Small Scale Industries, I have learned that mentoring entrepreneurs is not an easy “part-time” activity. One is continuously thinking of the Mentee and as one goes through one’s daily routine, one is always on the lookout for learning’s to share and in one’s encounter with the Mentee, open to learning from him/her. Such an attitude will ensure success of the Mentoring program.
melito.jr@gmail.com