5 Outcomes of Speed Mentoring
- Protégés will receive advice and leading questions to overcome challenges and see new opportunities. This is where the question of how much reflective advice can be shared in under 5 minutes – and the answer is not a lot. So this requires two important pieces of preparation for this to be a success: i) share as much information in advance of the event – for The World’s Largest Business Mentoring Event, we are producing mentor guides which include protégé bios and 3 challenges they are facing in their business; ii) It requires both parties to connect with velocity and skip the small talk (this is the biggest exception to the parallel between speed mentoring and speed dating).
- Introduce protégés to a broad and diverse range of prospective mentors. To steal an adage from an old fairy tale and common dating reference - ”You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your handsome prince.” This metaphorically applies to finding mentors/protégés too. It’s hard to know if there’s going to be chemistry in a relationship until you meet. I was a mentor in a program, where I knew after the response to my first question, that it was going to be a painful 3 month process, because we didn’t click. I’ve also searched for up to six months to find that special mentor I needed to help me overcome specific challenges.
- Showcase the programs that the mentors volunteer with. Mentorship programs like MaRS Advice have an extensive network of highly-connected mentors. Meeting with one of them, opens the door to a whole network of possible connections. Mentors can facilitate “collisions”: participant-to-participant and participant-to-mentor-–leading to new opportunities for partnership/collaboration/resources.
- Build a community of mentors. I was recently speaking to my friend Chris who volunteered as a mentor for a Summer Company mentoring session I was leading last summer. He mentioned that he had stayed in touch with Josh who was another one of our mentors and that he’d been in as a speaker/mentor for a number of business startup classes that Josh was teaching at a local college. The connective tissue that we create between mentors can have a HUGE ripple effect.
- Generate introductions to produce long-term mentoring relationships. This is really the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The big “aahhha”s likely won’t come from the speed mentoring interaction – but from the meetings that take place following it. The questions and advice that are shared at the event are just a prelude to future interactions – where the magic really happens.
Sat, Apr 14, 2012
Featured, How to Find a Mentor, Mentorship Programs