“Get a mentor – not a choice but a sure MUST”

This is something I say with lot of conviction and from my own experience of seeing what is it like with and without a mentor. I just came out of a mentoring session which happens once a month in our office and my mentor is a senior pro in the IT industry with more than 40 years of experience and who has worked directly for the likes of Azim Premji. He spends 6 to 8 hours with us on a trot trying to understand our strategy, ground reality, issues/concerns etc and analyzing them in a way which you never thought of and giving a shape of your company’s future and path to tread in a way which you wonder hey how did he do which didn’t occur to you etc etc. All these comes only from experience and to learn everything from our experiences is surely a “too-time-consuming way” and yes I consider myself very lucky to have such a mentor in the first place and then darn lucky to have him spend time with us every month like that.
Then why is it not such a prevalent thing around in our industry? Many reasons I have heard or come to my mind. Some feel that they probably know everything and don’t see value, some have lot of Ego to play with or others are too busy deep in their business that they never realized the value of one or could afford to take time to search for a right mentor. There are many cases where they are not networked well to have one but that should not be an excuse, the student willing, the teacher appears. Our case itself is a classic example, please do read further.
When we started in late 2003, we (founders) were probably the worst networked among IT peers, just a bunch of engineers who knew no one. We started an ODC way back in 1998 and ran it till late 2003 until it spun off to us to create an independent services company; until then we never networked with any one and there was no need to, it was a cost centre and we did the development – no sales neither marketing from here and we never grew beyond 20 and its only when you become a profit centre the real fun started J When you become responsible for the P&L, you will know how long the word “entrepreneurship” is!!
But in spite of this we were very clear with few things - we will focus on a niche area (and in fact the expertise we had already built), and we knew our weak spots (and also our sweet spots) and we needed a mentor for sure. We searched everywhere for a mentor but could not make that breakthrough until we saw a NASSCOM email which called for mentorship (there is a saying – you see what you want to see) and that was god send for us. (Note: TiE also does this mentorship programmes and I recommend to try TiE first before looking other avenues especially when you are still small and haven’t become a NASSCOM member yet). We applied and we were honest in our weakness and in fact very brutally honest and I guess the panel liked us and thank god we were selected. The mentor panel had the likes of CEOs, VPs of HR-Sales and Marketing, Directors etc of some of the well know software companies in town. Despite their busy schedules, they took time off to help us out by genuinely showing interest to learn our company, strategy, strength, weakness and analyse and help us out on what we need to do and what we need to fix and confirming some of our strengths and exposing some of our so called strengths and laid out a clear path for growth and sustainability and in that six months of mentorship we learnt more than what we did in the last two years of operation. Of course your experience and what you learn on the field, is not replaceable and you have learnt for your life but a light showing us a clear path makes your journey that much easier, and why re-invent the wheel when there are pros who are willing to help you out. The mentorship program of NASSCOM not only opened doors for the mentor session but also opened up for lot of business networking and one lead to other and suddenly you know many of the pros and they know you and it becomes that much easier to find the right mentor.
The help so far has been tremendous and is something I propose to all companies to try out on a must basis rather than an optional basis. Finding the right mentor is another issue for another day and can be a topic of my next blog. This is a topic by itself as there are various kinds. Let me talk about it in one of my ensuing blogs.
Hope the read was very informative and hope you find it helpful. Please leave your comments on what more and/or what different I can write about the mentorship. As always your feedback and comments are welcome.