Collaborative Mentoring: Decoding Digital Transformation Secret of Business Sustainability

Digital Transformation has been the most concerning agenda for every organization boardroom today & to combat this high tide, a new wave of Mentors is trending these days, where every other person is projecting itself to be a self-proclaimed mentor capable of enabling businesses & professionals achieve overnight success.

Despite a lack of credentials to justify their self-proclamation, the word ‘Mentor’ seems to be becoming the next buzzword. Since, the launch of the recent digital disruption a few years back, organizations across the planet are heading towards these mentors seeking their expert guidance to sustain the changing customer trends & survive for a longer term by avoiding gradual extinction.

Some organizations are also practising the less prevalent technique of reverse mentoring for engaging the younger generation in the business which, unfortunately, isn’t benefiting much as the younger generation has been terribly bitten by the entrepreneurship bug. Though, mentoring definitely helps a person or business to gain those precious insights from someone’s wisdom & intellect which helps in transforming an organization or human for a better & secure future. Despite their numerous benefits, both mentoring & reverse mentoring techniques aren’t able to deliver the desired outputs. Some reason could be:

• Reluctance to engagement
• Conflict of interest

• Fear of losing relevance
• Lack of trust
• Ego
• Unidirectional

In today’s connected world of rapidly changing business trends & human expectations, there is a need of evangelizing next level of mentoring technique which is driven by mutual consensus between the parties & uninfluenced by any demographical factors. It is not necessary for a person to share the same demography for qualifying to be a mentor as long as the person is fulfilling the purpose. This technique of transformation & survival which could prove to be a promising solution concerning an organization future business sustainability or a human transformation is called Collaborative Mentoring.

‘Collaborative Mentoring’ is an art of exchanging intellect where the wisdom of an experienced person meets the innovation & agility of a younger person in decrypting the key to successful transformation & explore the optimum balance between both the generations of mutual collaboration for future sustainability by respecting each other’s interests.

There is a strong need of practising collaborative mentoring across the planet at a personal & professional level concerning the changing population trends.

If we refer to the above world population distribution statistics, it is pretty evident that the younger generation is exploding & dominating the baby boomer & silent generations. At present, the young earning generation constitutes for 33% of world population and this number is constantly increasing with time.

This percentage is fairly high in the case of Asian & African countries which accounts for a major chunk of total world population & where the young generation is highly concentrated. There is no doubt on the fact that how Asian & African countries are progressing in terms of economic growth.

Another important perspective to understand here is that more than 50% of the world population is connected to the digital platform today in some way or the other way. Hence, to ensure a smooth transaction between these generations, collaborative mentoring is the right way for achieving long terms sustainability. Since the perception & expectations across the generations vary with the course of time, hence, it would not be an easy game to adopt collective mentoring. There are a few fundamentals that require to be in place for a productive collaborative mentoring initiative between different generations.

• Space: Offering optimum space to individuals would help to establish comfort zone & trust.
• Respect: Respecting each other’s perception & expectations would help to achieve a mutual consensus.

• Patience: Holding your horses for the right time to ripe would help to achieve the intended results.
• Perseverance: Staying determined in collaborating with each other for sharing intellect despite delayed results is critical in collaborative mentoring. This perseverance at times would act as a motivation in driving us in tough times.
• Acceptance: Accepting each other’s right perception & expectations would help in achieving a common consensus. Also, accepting the negativity is equally important to get back on right track.

Like conventional mentoring or reverse mentoring which are a unidirectional knowledge download initiative, collaborative mentoring on the other hand intends to play a wider role in helping individuals & businesses in identifying their purpose. The world today requires an alliance between the wisdom of the older generation & agility and innovation of the younger generation so that best of the best intellectual values could be conceived.

No matter how much advanced technologies, we may devise to sustain, but the capability to drive those technologies in the right direction to deliver desired output lies with the humans who make things happen on the ground. Hence, I believe, collaborative mentoring is the way for a brighter & sustainable future of our generations in successfully surviving the digital transformation wave.

“Nobody knows everything, but everybody knows something”

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