Hey Team Leaders: Here’s a System to Support Multiple Mentees Without it Getting Hectic

To say we need a new understanding of mentorship is an understatement, particularly in a more remote-first world where people are learning on the fly and new technologies are being invented that no one has experience with yet. In specific, we have to move past the idea that mentorship needs to be synchronous, 1:1 meetings. There are so many ways to learn, particularly for team leaders that work with multiple mentees. Here’s a system you can use to save some time and increase your mentorship impact.

The point of mentorship is not meetings

Mentorship is a method of learning how to solve a problem from someone who has already solved that problem in a similar context. That’s really it. The idea of private meetings came about because many mentorship conversations are confidential or sensitive, but there are easy ways around that. 

Here’s why a sole focus on synchronous mentorship meetings is a bad outcome for everyone: 

A mentor’s time is valuable: the best mentors are also the best practitioners, meaning they have a lot of demands on their time. Further, a mentor with multiple mentees will have greater time demands - even if their only job is guiding and leading people.

Mentees need multiple information sources: the time spent in all those 1:1 meetings is time that could (and arguably should) be spent learning from multiple sources. There’s also the element of being a mentee that you may not even know what questions to ask, making time you spent with a mentor potentially less fruitful than it could be. 

Many challenges are similar: because mentorship is about helping someone solve a problem, chances are multiple mentees will be posing similar challenges to their one mentor. This creates an annoying repetition cycle where the information is new to every mentee but the mentor or leader has said it for the fourth time that week.

A system for scalable mentorship

Here’s a new system that minimizes - or avoids altogether - the necessity of 1:1 meetings. It starts with an asynchronous foundation and builds from there. The goal outcome is everyone saving time, mentees getting multiple learning touch points, and mentors not having to repeat themselves. 

Step 1: Set up

As a mentor or leader, sign up for Yac and set up a group between you and your mentees. Make sure everyone in the group agrees to keep things confidential. To make it easier to explain, just declare Chatham House Rules.

Step 2: Advise

Encourage mentees to send their questions as voice notes. Using Yac, you can also send screen recordings if necessary. All the questions will come as a thread in the group, making it easy to see who sent what. As a mentor or leader, you can send public replies for any general questions or choose a private reply if things get too confidential for the group.

Step 3: Collaborate 

Mentees can pay attention to the questions and answers posed by others in the group, thus making the mentorship process collaborative. This process not only provides a reference point if someone hits a specific problem in the future, but also gives mentees additional insight into how other people ask questions.

Step 4: Decentralize

When a mentee poses a problem and the mentor provides an answer, other mentees can chime in if they have experiences to share on the topic. This decentralizes the mentorship process, meaning mentees can learn from each other. As a result, mentors see reduced absolute dependency on them for all insight and ideas.

As a result of this system, mentors and mentees alike save tons of time between booking meetings and other prep. Answers are shared with the whole group, so every mentee can benefit from the learning. There’s even a bonus opportunity: if the answers are general enough and everyone is ok with it, you as a mentor can share your answers publicly, scaling your ability to help people. While this may not work for private team insights, it can be powerful for the general startup mentorship ecosystem. 

Get more from your time

Mentorship is fundamentally a utilitarian relationship. That’s not to say mentors do not become friends or build long-lasting relationships with mentees. Far from it, and those types of connections can (and should) be fostered in person. But for the more practical elements of mentorship - sharing solutions or thought-starters in response to problems - do it asynchronously. Done right, you can spend all that in-person time sharing war stories and getting to know each other instead of worrying about a specific problem.