So, you've found your mentor and can't wait to jump in.

Now what?

Here's how to get the most out of your mentorship.

## Goal setting

Most mentors like to start by setting clear goals. Examples of goals:

- "receive best ever performance review"
- "get in control of my projects and responsibilities"
- "beat my OKRs by 20% by end of year"

Before you meet with you mentor, it's helpful to spend some time thinking about which areas of your work life you're looking to improve. Next, you'll work with your mentor to make and measure progress.

## Get organized

### Start a shared document

In between conversations with your mentor, a lot can happen. We recommend that you keep a shared document with you mentor, in which you list items you want to discuss. Had a conflict with a co-worker? Afraid you won't make your deadline? Feel like you weren't able to help a colleague do good work? Add it to the shared document!

This helps avoid the pitfall of only discussing recent events with your mentor.

### Meet on a regular schedule

A key benefit of mentorship is accountability. A mentor helps you stay on track towards your goals, even when you feel like you're not making any progress.

For that reason, it's a good idea to have a regular cadence of video calls with your mentor (e.g every other Monday).

### Evaluate your progress

A mentorship is only as valuable as the results it creates.

It's important to continuously evaluate your progress towards your goals. Mentees on Pelion often find that they make progress faster than expected, and set their bar too low. Is it time to set more ambitious goals?

## Be ready to learn

It might sound simplistic, but the first step to learning is acknowledging that there's something you don't know.

For most of our careers, confidence pays. Most workplace don't encourage saying "I don't know" or asking for help. As a result, most of us have a hard time acknowledging when we're out of our comfort zone.

**Your mentorship is different.**

Your time with your mentor is when you can ask questions, acknowledge that everyone can improve, and perhaps even vent a bit.

Have questions about how to get the most out of your mentorship? Send an email to [hello@pelion.app](mailto:hello@pelion.app)

How to get the most out of your mentorship

Congrats, you've been introduced to a potential mentee who thinks you might be a good mentor for them!

At this point, the mentee will have reviewed your profile, and has expressed explicit interest in having you as their mentor. If they've signed up via our self-serve solution, they will have already paid for the initial month (though our money-back guarantee applies).

As a rule, Pelion makes sequential, not parallel, mentor intros — so you're not competing against anyone for the mentorship.

**The first step in your upcoming mentorship is to conduct an introduction call. This post describes how to do those calls.**

## The purpose of the intro call

Intro calls are meant to uncover whether or not the mentor-mentee match is a good one.

We define a good match as one in which A) the mentor has a clear view of, and personal experience with, the path before the mentee, and B) the interpersonal chemistry is good.

As a mentor, you might feel the need to "sell yourself" as a mentor, but since it's no fun being in a poorly matched mentorship, we advise against doing so.

## What to talk about

Every intro call should cover at least the following topics:

- Overview of each party's background and work experience
- Introduction to the mentee's professional challenges. - What challenges is the mentee looking to work on? - How do these challenges manifest day over day? - How would success be defined? What will progress look like?
- Aligning expectations of time commitment. Will you talk twice per month? Every week? Will the mentor be required to review ad-hoc work in between mentorship calls?

Beyond that, we try to not be prescriptive — so go with your intuition!

## Practical info about intro calls

- Intro calls should default to video on (though this is not a hard rule).
- Most intro calls should take 20-30 minutes.
- Do not discuss pricing — this is Pelion's job, and we're generally able to negotiate better rates.

## After the call

Formally, the mentee is charged with letting us know once an intro call is done.

That said, we recommend that you let you Pelion Agent know when you've had an intro call. Please include a brief summary of your impression of the call. This ultimately helps us negotiate a better price for you.

## Questions about intro calls?

Let us know! Contact your Pelion Agent, or email hello@pelion.app.

How to conduct intro calls

Mentees and mentors have lots of conversations through Pelion. We collect feedback from both parties after the conversations. This is what we've learned about how to conduct effective mentorship conversations.

## Start With Introductions

If this is your first talk, it's helpful to start with introductions. Generally, about 30 seconds from each party is sufficient. A few things to cover:

- Brief overview of your career
- What you do in your current position
- Your areas of expertise

## Who's Driving?

There are two modes of mentorship conversations: A) in which the mentor answers questions the mentee has reflected on in advance, and B) in which the mentor helps the mentee understand which questions to ask. Effective conversations will most often be a combination of both.

Ideally, the mentee is in the driver's seat most of the time. Mentees are asked to set an agenda before the call, and specify a few questions. These will be forwarded to you.

Some common topics of conversation: should I specialize or become a generalist in my field? What resources should I be reading? How should I plan my career over the next five years? What's a reasonable salary range for my level?

Questions and topics can be either specific: "which level job should I apply for?", or more general: "I'm good at xyz, what kind of company might be right for me?". We find that that addressing question in order of specific to general works best. This often manifests as the mentee leading off the conversation, and the mentor tying it all together at the end.

## End With Guidance

The best conversations end with the mentor guiding the mentee through suggested next steps. This could be specific introductions, materials to read, or updates to be made to a resume.

Defining next steps is often the most helpful thing a mentor can do.

## Make introductions

If you know someone your mentee should absolutely talk to — please use the Pelion introduction tool to connect the two. This helps us keep track and make sure you get paid.

## Say "I Don't Know"

Giving bad advice can be harmful. Luckily, this is easily avoidable by simply stating your confidence level before answering a question ("I don't feel confident, but if I would have to guess...").

The risk of bad advice is greater in mentorship conversations as the mentee assumes that the mentor knows their stuff. Acknowledging that even someone as senior as yourself doesn't know everything can often be empowering to more junior mentees.

Mentorship Guide

Mentorship is a didactic tool, expressed in relationships.

A mentor is someone who repeatedly uses wisdom and intuition to point another in the direction of intelligent actions.

If you enjoy the classics, you might think of mentorship in the Homeric sense. Homer's Mentor embodies both the virtues of intelligence and wisdom, perhaps with intuition as the primary virtue, as epitomized by Athena, goddess of Wisdom's, disguising herself as Mentor when visiting Oddyseus' son Telemachus.

## What mentorship is not

Some things that mentorship is not:

**Teaching:** teaching happens when one person has information and data sought by the other. What's being transferred is generally information, not knowledge.

**Crucially:** in teaching, the teacher decides what the student should learn –– rather than the student setting the direction. Interestingly, our favourite "teachers" were most often those who diverged from this role, into mentorship territory.

**Coaching:** coaching involves an active practice on behalf of the student. This practice is confined to one area of study (like golf or management). Most commonly the student does not expect to eclipse the coach in skill level, and very rarely does the coach expect to learn from the student.

**Friendship:** friendships are things of the heart. Friendships are intimate and non-hierarchical. A friendship's value is innate, in much the same way that some messages are all medium and no payload. Great mentorships will often include anelement of friendship, but this is not their purpose.

What is mentorship?

Mentorships are series of questions. Good mentors ask questions that guidementees to the next insight, providing information and data where necessary. Good mentees ask questions that help the mentor understand their world, and search forrelevant experiences. A unique feature of mentorship is that the mentor's learningoften rivals the mentee's.

A common hindrance for mentorship is reluctance to surrender one's naturalaversion to asking others for help. A fruitful mentorship requires both parties toacknowledge what they don't know, and that they're willing to learn. An open-minded mentorship session is a potent opportunity for learning, while a close-minded one is a waste of time. In this sense, beginner's mind is essential tomentorship. This also explains why mentorship must be entered into voluntarily –– obligatory mentorship is an oxymoron.

Mentorship has another prerequisite: boundaries. Applied in two ways:

1. Defining when the mentorship ends. Even if a mentorship is continually renewed or reconvened, its ceasing must always be its goalpost. "How will you know whenyou've mastered the necessary skills?" is a fundamental question.
2. Defining how and when you talk. Clear boundaries around timing and communication helps everyone show up to sessions in a productive frame of mind.

What makes up a mentorship

A mentor on Pelion is like having cheat codes to your work life. How does this all work? Read on!

## Interacting with your mentor

Mentorships on Pelion are series of conversations.
You'll primarily interact with your mentor through periodic video calls. It's up for you to decide whether you want one, two, or four calls per month.
In between video calls, you can send ad hoc messages to your mentor, asking for sparring on challenges as they arise.

## What you'll get

Having a mentor is like talking to a time-travelling version of yourself. Can you imagine the advice you would give to yourself from a few years ago? That's what mentorship is.
**Your mentor can help you in a few ways:**

- Navigate new challenges as they arise
- Engage with your team in a productive way
- Learn state of the art best practices for your role
- Managing upwards
- Perhaps most importantly: give you confidence as you go about your work.

One of our mentors, [Lindsay Pettingill](/mentors/lindsay) says:

> I help my mentees apply different frameworks for thinking about their work. As a mentor I see a lot of repeat challenges, and have developed a sense of how to quickly resolve issues.

Have questions about what to expect? Email [hello@pelion.app](mailto:hello@pelion.app)

What to expect from your mentorship

Scientists have long studied the most effective ways to learn.

The conclusions? Exactly what you might expect: if you want to learn French, go to France. If you want to improve your golf handicap, play golf. If you want to ace the SAT, get a tutor.

Basically: you get better by doing things. This is also true for your work life. Most people get better at their jobs over the course of their careers.

But what if you can't wait to be better? What if you need to learn fast? To meet a goal? Land a new project? Ace a new role?

**In that case, mentorship might help.**

In 1984, educational Psychologist Benjamin Bloom reported a finding now known as _Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem_. He observed that students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better on tests. This is true for most disciplines.

**You might think of mentorship as tutoring for your professional life.**

Instead of a full-time teacher, it's more practical to learn from someone who's does a similar job, but further up the career level.

**This is because learning from a current practitioner ensures that you're getting the best of what other people have already figured out. The current best practices.**

Another benefit of learning from a practitioner is that there simply might be not resources about how to do your precisely your job. Ever wanted to learn from someone who's been in exactly your position? Mentorship is just that.

Accountability is another reason that mentorship works. We've all felt the frustration of attempting to learn something new, but struggling to figure out the next step, and keep ourselves to it. Talking to a mentor on a regular schedule will help track your progress and keep your momentum going.

In summary, mentorship works because:

- One-on-one is the most effective learning style.
- A mentor knows exactly how to do your job well.
- Scheduled conversations keep you accountable and disciplined in your learning.

Ready to find a mentor for you, or someone on your team? [Sign up here](/join).

How to conduct intro calls

What to expect from your mentorship

Why mentorship works

How to get the most out of your mentorship