The Business of Mentoring: Helping Others to the Top, by Amelie Mapapa

MAPAPA Amélie

The Business of Mentoring: Helping Others to the top

I can define a mentor as a person who advice you or guide you, it is a person in who you can trust. Sometimes people make confusion between mentoring and coaching, those two words don’t mean the same; a mentor can be a coach but a coach can’t be a mentor. There is two kind of mentoring: formal and informal. Formal mentoring is more professional, mentor and mentee are “paired based on compatibility” and informal mentoring the relationship is more personal between the mentor and the mentee, they both “self-select on the basis of personal chemistry”.

During the Business Journals Speed Mentoring at the Swissotel, we had the opportunity to meet a lot of businesswomen who are also mentor as Cindy Kurman Barrie who is the president of Kurman Communications, Inc. and also the occasion to network with other people and gain new insights.

In the link bellow, you can read an article from Forbes untitled: “How to Make a Business Mentoring Relationship Work”.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2012/03/20/effective-business-mentoring-is-a-relationship/ 

After the Speed Mentoring, we visit the 360 Chicago observation deck at the John Hancock building with the Associate Sales Manager Christopher Rondeau who talk to us about is background, the history of the tower and he gives us some advices about mentoring.

The view from the John Hancock building

Then we went at the Tour of Google and me have met Megan Danielson who is the head of industry, travel and also Matt Jones who is the sr. account manager, travel.

Google is an American multinational corporation who was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google first product was to link search and now Google have other products as Google driven Google drive, Google map, YouTube… The goal of the company is to make people life more easy and efficient; thanks to Google map we can go to a point A to a point B, YouTube allowed us to listen to music and Gmail is a good way for us to have our email.

The company has 40,000 employees in 70 offices worldwide and their mission is to organize the world information and make it universally. Google always want to make the difference and we saw it during the visit of the Tour, they like to anticipate people needs.

The reason why the food is free in the company is because Google believes that if they can bring people to eat together, it can facilities collaboration and team building. It is also the reason why when you are in the cafeteria all the tables are long, the company wants all the employees to talk between them, and even they don’t know each other. It is the culture of the company.

For the externally networking the company work with a lot of others companies like United Airlines that is an airplane company, they also have a videoconference TV that allowed them to have videoconference with the other employees of different countries. The reason why they like videoconference is because you can see people faces.

And for the internally networking, they have a lot of sport like baseball, hockey and running events.

The company has a matching donation and they care about volunteering. They allowed their employees 20% of their time (a day in a week) they can do something else than their job, something that can value the company.

A picture of Google’s Lobby

And at the end of the day we met Gigi who was our guest speaker; she is a French woman who now leaves in America. Her mission here is to help French people to be insert in America. For her he most important in the American society are networking and volunteering.


To conclude I can say that in life we have to learn how to give a part of our time, maybe to something we like or something we are passionate to because it is this little thing that will make the difference between me and another person.