The role of mentoring for women has changed significantly in recent years, with the focus shifting towards having both business and life coaches.
The role of mentoring for women has changed significantly in recent years, with the focus shifting towards having both business and life coaches.
Honorary senior research fellow at the UWA Business School, Leonie Still, said with the increasing number of women in high levels of management, more women were looking towards both business and personal mentors.
She said that, while a growing number of women used male mentors for help with the technical aspects, they were also looking for prominent women to help them develop strategies to balancing their work and personal life.
“Previously, women wanted to know how to succeed in a man’s world. Women were very few and far between in prominent positions in that time [in the early 1980s],” Professor Still said.
“The emphasis has now shifted from being singularly career focused to now being that they want to have a life as well.”
Professor Still, who has sat on a number of boards as chairman and director, believes the increasing demands on managers and the changing nature of business has given rise to a growth in executive business coaching.
“Tenures in the top jobs don’t last long any more. It’s very lonely at the top,” she said.
“You’ve got no-one to talk to; you can’t always talk to the person under you because they might be after your job.”
Business coach Michelle McGrath said women often lacked the confidence of their male counterparts, or dismissed their abilities as “just doing their job”.
“Women just ‘do’ and don’t realise what skills and talents they actually have. They need to be recognised to develop that confidence,” she said.
A business owner for more than 18 years, Ms McGrath is currently developing Western Australia’s first state-based women’s mentoring network, providing business women and potential mentors with a local support base.
She believes there is growing demand from women for both business and life coaching.
“It depends on what they’re looking for in a mentor and what they want to achieve, whether you want to develop business or personal skills,” Ms McGrath said. “For women it’s more of mix of the two.
“Some women do feel more comfortable with other women [mentors]. But sometimes it can be more industry specific, for example in the mining industry it may be more appropriate to have male mentor.”
