
Treat mentorship as a noun and cultivate verbs like coaching, instructing, guiding, and sharing experience. Learn how mentors differ from coaches, consultants, and advisors, and prioritize unpaid, personal founder growth.
Be the founder who owns outcomes and drives progress by submitting meeting agendas and notes with action items, showing up consistently, and staying in touch with mentors.
Establish a clear plan by defining founder goals, objectives, and milestones, and structure with a written business model canvas or strategic plan.
Choose asking over telling to coach startup founders, focusing on questions like what's on your mind and what else to uncover underlying challenges, then offer one critical piece of advice.
Stay curious, not overly invested, as a mentor. Focus on uncovering hurdles and supporting the founder’s learning, while recognizing the founder—not the mentor—bears ultimate responsibility for success.
This is the course for mentors in structured team mentorship programs that work with entrepreneurs. If you just joined a team mentorship program, or are considering joining this is can be a helpful course for you.
First, we are going to go over definitions and see what makes the role of a mentor different from that of a coach, consultant, or an advisor.
Then we'll look closer at team mentoring. Most people have some experience and understanding how mentorship works 1 on 1. When it comes to team mentoring, when one mentee is paired with a group of 2-5 mentors, the situation is not as straightforward. There are some dynamics that can make this relationship very successful, or quite messy and unfocused. This course is aimed to make it easier to get a head start, and become an effective mentors faster.
We’ll go over the basics in terms of expectations, how team mentorship works based on the experience of the author of running such a mentorship program for about 4 years.
As part of the course, you are going to learn some best practices around mentorship that will help you become a better mentor, and you'll get a chance to go over two practical case studies from real life.
Each group of mini-lectures is going to be followed by a short quiz to help build confidence in the content.
This course will be a great start for someone just starting out in a team mentorship environment, as well as a good refresher for a mentor who wants to go over the basics again.