<span style="font-weight: 400;">There are a ton of benefits to establishing a culture of mentoring within your organization. This post will share those benefits with you and explain how to cultivate the mentoring culture within your organization.</span>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learning is a two way street</span></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Within any organization you have your mentors (the ones who give information) and the mentees (the recipients of information). </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">When you create a culture of mentorship, mentees will feel more protected and welcome in your organization’s culture if they have good mentorship. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">At the same time, mentors benefit from solidifying their wisdom and establishing their expertise through generosity and teaching.</span>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mentorship accelerates learning. </span></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">In a culture with mentorship, information flows freely throughout the organization. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">You just need one really good mentor knowledgeable in an area, and everyone will benefit from that knowledge. Having a quality mentor elevates everyone to the highest common denominator. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">You want knowledge to flow from the highest point instead of individuals being hyper-focused in some areas and left out of others.</span>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Define mentorship roles</span></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">One way to bake culture into your organization is to have mentorship become a specific role. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the many advantages of a role based system like </span><a href="http://www.livingorgs.com/holacracy-overview"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Holacracy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is that you get to be explicit about the roles that you care about. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In addition to someone’s various other roles that they take on, mentorship can become one of them. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, let’s pretend you create the role of a Design Mentor in your organization. The explicit purpose is to focus on those junior designers who know less. Accountabilities are clearly spelled out and inspire the mentors to give feedback, guide, and suggest resources.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Once you have a role, you can add goals and metrics for success. Think about metrics such as surveying junior staff. Or, setting the goal that a junior position will learn at least one new skill within their field each month.</span>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mentorship creates a healthy feedback culture</span></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Another important aspect of mentorship is to create a healthy feedback culture. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Feedback is a skill, and it needs to be acquired, honed and practiced. Your team needs to give it the time and focus it needs to become really good at it. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The more you increase the flow of feedback in your culture, the quicker things go in terms of mentorship and learning.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The biggest impediment to learning is the lack of humility. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">We’ve become a culture of know-it-alls. In our society, it is somehow wrong to admit ignorance. But how can you learn if you pretend to know everything? </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Not knowing is the freedom to be open to knowledge and new experience.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Starting from the most powerful position in the organization, you can set the tone for humility by admitting ignorance when ignorance is true and invite teaching with humility and alertness. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyone can mentor everyone within the organization. Even the most powerful positions in the company have something to learn from others.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">By creating a tone of mentorship, you create a safe place for others to be humble and admit when they need help.</span>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">This speeds up progress, innovation and communication within your organization.</span>