How Mentorship Empowers Women Entrepreneurs: Strategies for Success and Growth
✍️ Opinions
This article has been contributed by Lakshmi Prasanna, Co-Founder, of Leadership Mavericks.
After having worked in a corporate environment for some of the biggest names in executive hiring, there was so much that I was uncertain about when I decided to start off on my own. I was confident of my tradecraft and my network but I was fairly unsure about how to run a business. My partner and I were in complete agreement that we needed to be mentored but we struggled to find opportunities for formal mentorship.
Entrepreneurship more than any other profession really benefits from mentorship because there’s no formula for success. An entrepreneur succeeds after taking several calculated risks, making mistakes, failing and innovating to move forward. Their success rate can really improve if they have the guidance of a mentor.
For women entrepreneurs, this search is even harder. Why does gender matter, one may wonder? It comes down to a number of factors, our social conditioning, the power equations at play in any working environment, the circles we move in or we don’t belong to, the opportunities we hear of and our access to resources. It also comes down to how we, as entrepreneurs, perceive mentorship and how mentors perceive their own role in this entire equation. Are we scared of being told that our ideas are terrible? On the flipside, Is it fair for a mentor to brutally criticize someone’s hard work in the hope that it will motivate them to try harder?
The challenges faced by a woman entrepreneur are different. They aren’t bigger or lesser than the challenges before all entrepreneurs but understanding how they are different can help make mentoring women more contextual and impactful. Here are some of the ways that women can take charge of their own entrepreneurship journey.
The Different Paths to Mentorship
Reaching Out for Help
The Journey Never Ends
The Different Paths to Mentorship
Not every entrepreneur is going to take the same approach to mentorship. While some may opt for a more structured mentorship, comprising a formal mentoring and self-learning relationship, others seek their mentors from industries outside their ambit of work. Even a friend or a relative with a successful sales career could be a potential mentor. Every entrepreneur has different needs and a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. The mentor you need may not be the mentor you have set your heart on. If the search for a perfect mentor is holding you back then maybe you should look closer to home and you may find what you are looking for.
After we struggled to find the perfect mentor (with a fair amount of disappointment and heartbreak), we realised that each of us has strengths that we can share with the team. We took our first steps by mentoring each other. The most important aspect of this equation is that we were receptive to the knowledge being shared. We wanted to learn from each other. This is where women entrepreneurs can really thrive and it is something that is happening organically in a lot of organizations we know. Instead of looking outside for a formal mentor, we come together to form a collective of sorts where we are all equal partners and we share and receive our knowledge with a lot of respect for where each of us is coming from.
That said, we made mistakes. We picked ourselves up and kept going. Today we have a formal mentor and the difference they have made to the way we work is exceptional. The bottom line is that when a mentor is hard to find, don’t let it stop your work.
Reaching Out for Help
As women, we find it hard to admit that we cannot make something work. We try twice as hard to find solutions because we have something to prove. This is ingrained into us from when we start our careers. As an entrepreneur, reaching out for help is very important and this may be where we differ from the men, we do not ask for mentorship enough. We don’t reach out to mentors out of fear. A report published by MicroSave Consulting for the Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) found that 18 % of the women they surveyed were afraid of how they would be perceived when they reached out to a mentor. We are worried about how we will be judged. We worry if we will be able to communicate what we want to do so we are taken seriously. We worry if we will lose ownership of our own ideas and if we will be coerced into doing something we don’t want to. While these fears are valid, they need to be thought of as a right of passage. Overcoming them is important if you really want to succeed. You may really like the person you become at the end of all this.
Subham Agrawal
The Journey Never Ends
When Monika and I started Leadership Mavericks we decided that we would be the support we needed. We keep asking ourselves if we were giving our team what we would have wanted and more importantly, what they needed? We want to create a supportive environment. Of course, none of this would have been possible if we did not know what we wanted in the first place. As a woman entrepreneur, I don’t hesitate to admit that I don’t know what I don’t know. Figuring out what I don’t know is important to me. It makes me think about what I should do to make myself more aware. And we may have started a successful Executive Search firm but our journey hasn’t ended. Each of us has achieved varying degrees of success in all the things we are talking about in this article. We haven’t done it all. We always need to ask ourselves, “Where am I on my journey?” I don’t need an outsider to tell me what I am doing but I do need to invest in me. When we get caught in the flow of our day-to-day work we sometimes forget to pause and ask ourselves this question.
Ria Sahni
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