Written by: Dr. Hynd Bouhia, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Surveys and studies have shown that when women get mentored, they are five times more likely to be promoted! This is one of the main reasons why more and more women are looking for the right mentors to help them springboard their careers and reach high-level leadership positions. It has been long proven that having a mentor helps executive women and professional women thrive, shine, and get nominated for higher responsibilities.
When women create a nurturing environment around them, it helps them feel safe and protected. It is also a way for them to get the right mindset and to get back on track when doubt and low self-esteem creep in every time work starts to get overwhelming.
Having a positive emotional state stimulates creativity and productivity, which are both essential to having a successful career and reaching leadership positions. And mentors play a central role in providing that safety net and protective feeling for women.
Mentors make women feel that they are not alone. They stand on the shoulders of countless women before them, all of whom have done and are still accomplishing extraordinary things. They teach. They code. They unlock the secrets of life. They launch tech startups, finance new ventures, and run multinational corporations. They can’t wait to share their experience, their mistakes as well as their successes.
What do mentors bring?
They share experiences: In a corporate environment, it might feel challenging to learn how to navigate through the layers of company politics and be able to get the support and the backup for their responsibility and their projects. It also helps them prove themselves more easily.
The political labyrinth in the work setup can be very complicated. This is why learning from shared experience and from some who have managed how to navigate through responsibilities and different contexts.
They help define their career goals: Women are more successful when they have a mentor to help them define their career goals and objectives. A mentor makes it easier to see the bigger picture and brings a long-term perspective.
If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you define the path to get there?
Thus, by defining your career path, you can design the right strategy to get there with the help of your mentor.
They bring accountability: Creating an accountability mechanism helps women learn how to be accountable for themselves and how to become disciplined. It helps them get into the habit of being more reliable and more disciplined in everything they do.
They help in staying focused and grounded: The mentor helps you stay focused and on top of your workload. It also provides a nurturing environment to feel safe and grounded. In addition, a mentor helps improve the communication skills and the way to the presence in important meetings.
In addition, mentorship helps women work on their pitch and their delivery to get promoted, to raise funds for the organization they work in, their company, and their start-up.
Establishing a Sisterhood network
Helping other women takes many forms. One is mentoring, the interpersonal relationships that offer moral support and professional advice. It often takes the shape of an experienced woman helping a young apprentice navigate her academic or professional decisions. But the nature of mentoring is evolving quickly in both contours and scale.
None other than Oprah Winfrey has observed that mentoring goes both ways. It’s not just sage on the stage, holding forth. The mentor must feel some unique source of interest within the mentee to kindle the flame for both. In her book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandbur inverted the advice commonly given to girls, from: “Find a mentor to excel” to: “Excel so that you can find a mentor.”
Mentoring comes more easily to women than to men. Building a career more than a business, females find comfort and value in supportive networks and associations, whether “Girls who code” or “women in business.” Dedicated forums, platforms, and exchanges help women connect in person and online. Other economic and social forums are advancing women’s voices in domains as diverse as public health, climate change, and artificial intelligence. Google’s emerging ‘Daring Circle’ sets up working groups for women in STEM, which take a holistic approach to removing barriers at all levels of education in the corporate world.
Silicon Valley has launched networks in response to the low percentage of women in venture capital and startups. These include “Women who tech,” “Women who code,” “Women in STEM,” or “Hackathon for women.” Another network arises in all-female tech gatherings such as the “Grace Hopper Conference,” where women share experiences, ideas – and mentors.
Today, serval programs are led by mentors and coaches to help women in their careers and harness their leadership skills. The successes we see in executive and professional women within the BAL Method ¹ Masterminds speak to that. Sandra was nominated to the board before the Mastermind was finished, or Anna left her toxic job and found a more fit environment doubling her salary. Another great example is Oumnya, who was able to find a new job doubling her salary in Investment Banking after two months within our Empowered Leaders Mastermind.
Finally, it takes the will to put everything around you to help you reach the level of success you want. And finding a good mentor is on top of that list because the chance of getting promoted is multiplied by 5. The benefits can prove to be bigger when it comes to scaling up a business.
Dr. Hynd Bouhia, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Hynd Bouhia has cumulated more than 20 years of professional experience in high-level and leadership positions, covering investments, financial structuring, entrepreneurship, and sustainable development strategies. Hynd Bouhia was nominated by Forbes among the 100 most influential women in the world in 2008 and among the most influential women in Business in the Arab World in 2015 and honored as a member of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2018.
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