Today is the launch day that we’ve been awaiting for 6 months. We’ve taken your feedback and made MilitaryMentors.org into something great. Check us out, share, and invite your friends and colleagues.
Military leaders are constantly saying that people are our most precious resource. We wholeheartedly agree, but until today, the current options for professional development were simply not cutting it.
Military professionals have been wanting something more for years. We’ve gone out on our own and created blogs, online forums, and ad-hoc discussion groups, but each attempt has been lacking something.
That missing element is people and the human element. Professional development is about improving the people in our profession, so it takes more than just reading – it takes learning. We need to learn about ourselves (our strengths and weaknesses) before we can actually improve ourselves.
Mentoring is a voluntary developmental relationship that exists outside of the chain of command between a person of greater experience and a person of lesser experience and it is characterized by mutual trust and respect. Mentoring can occur between individuals of the same or different ranks and it often occurs between a seasoned senior-NCO and a junior officer. Mentoring is not, however, cronyism or favoritism.
True professional mentoring involves personalized interaction by people who have a vested interest in professional development. Individuals must participate freely, have the resources to develop each other, and share a desire to shape the next generation of leaders while learning from others who have gone before them.
A review of 30 years of research confirms that mentoring contributes significantly to career success.[i] Workers who report having had a mentor enjoy more rapid promotions, greater productivity, better professional confidence, higher competence, lower levels of job-related stress, and even a greater perceived chance of becoming eminent in their fields.[ii]
Not just that, the same research showed that mentoring had significant positive correlations with work performance, more positive attitudes toward work, more career satisfaction, retention, organizational citizenship behavior, positive work attitudes, personal health, quantity of interpersonal relationships, greater career recognition, and general career competence.[iii]
We’re incredibly excited about today’s launch because our latest improvements make MilitaryMentors.org into a social network that truly connects military professionals to each other and to the resources they need for professional development wherever they are.
The network functions similar to an online gym membership (with our own version of scales and free weights). How?
1) Professional development starts with understanding yourself. Start by taking any of our 10 free assessments. Discover your strengths, understand your personality, and explore your leadership style. Learn about what makes you the type of leader that you are by getting familiar with your Myers-Briggs, Big Five, and FIRO-B assessments.
2) Hone your strengths, improve your weaknesses. Dive into our resource library to unlock new tools from professional researchers to blogs and journals. We’ve created a detailed and curated central resource for everything from “unofficial” professional writing outlets to scholarly military journals to help you find what you’re looking for no matter what service, specialty, or rank you are.
3) Don’t go it alone. Professional development is a lot like exercise – you’re more successful with a partner. No CAC readers or desktop computers, just a simple, secure, and mobile interface.
Repeated PCS moves makes it nearly impossible to stay connected (and as a new ensign or lieutenant it can seem impossible to connect beyond your unit). Search our community to find someone who can support your development.
Or join a Circle to become part of a group (or create your own). Circles are the modern solution to the officer/NCO clubs that fellow leaders and mentors have been calling for[iv]. Whether it’s a DEF Agora or a local “Drink and Think”, the goal is always the same. At MilitaryMentors, users can see all of the local groups around them and be instantly connected to new, local communities of practice.
Similarly, senior leaders who are experts and thought leaders can maximize their reach by hosting their own Circle. Unlike a blog, Circles are omni-directional and sorted locally which allows for richer online discussions and in-person development. How many officers from O-4 to O-6 could be engaging in rich junior leader development, but don’t have the opportunity based on their current duty position? Battalion commanders and skippers are often too busy for this, while their peers in non-command positions are often so far away from the junior leaders that could benefit the most. Circles offer the opportunity to engage and inspire multiple protégés at once.
4) Share your insights and ideas. Our Forums are not like traditional message board for keyboard debates. At MilitaryMentors.org, you do more than comment. You can upload and share documents to create crowd sourced libraries of articles, videos, and other resources that can start long discussions and fuel professional development.
Military Mentors is not Facebook for the military or a new spin on an existing system – it’s a professional development network. Start Come see for yourself today.
Start a conversation. Spark a transformation.
[i] W. Brad Johnson and Gene R. Andersen, “Formal Mentoring in the U.S. Military: Research Evidence, Lingering Questions, and Recommendations”, Naval War College Review, (Spring, 2010) Vol. 63, No.2, p. 113-126 https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/1d75c515-7093-4bc3-92fa-7284b7198bb4/Formal-Mentoring-in-the-U-S–Military–Research-Ev
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] https://medium.com/the-bridge/new-model-mentoring-ce4a65fd9669#.s3c61unjf