Lesson 24: Engaging Mentors & Advisors

Engaging Mentors & Advisors Effectively

Mentor meetings are opportunities to address challenges and gain insights that could change the course of your company. Here are some ways to hold productive mentor meetings and optimize interactions to drive your business forward.

Engage with Mentors

Companies often don’t feel like they’ve got into their groove until 15-20 meetings with a mentor. That means companies waste a lot of time trying to figure out what the discussion is even about. Thus, your goal should be to optimize the dynamic you share with a mentor to drive value both ways. Surrounding yourself with mentors who give first to help build your business can be game-changing for an entrepreneur.

One thing that is often overlooked is preparation prior to the meeting. Make sure that you are making the most of each mentor meeting by planning a rough agenda of what you intend to discuss, including questions and topics. Remember that mentors are usually experts in their fields and hence they are busy. Of course, you are also very busy running your own business, so don’t waste any time. Jump right jump into the discussion with an actionable discussion plan.

Read Your Mentor

Checking their watch, fidgeting or leaning in are all nonverbal signs mentors may give you during a meeting. Recognize communication cues to figure out if you need to shift the conversation elsewhere. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs lose focus or track of the conversation. Any good mentor will get tired of this if it becomes a pattern. Don’t hurt your odds of building a strong relationship with your mentor because of your inability to understand body language and conversation norms. During a meeting, the mentor could get hung up on a topic you don’t want to explore. In this case, to avoid going down conversational rabbit holes, practice ways to get the meeting back on track. Either way, it’s very important to be in tune with how your mentor is feeling in your session.

The best way to do this is to watch their body language. Most communication is done non-verbally, and it is in the learning to read body language that you get really good at engaging not only mentors but humans everywhere. If they’re fidgety or checking their watch or phone, just learning how to recognize when a person’s eyes glaze over, learning how to recognize that lean-in motion when somebody is really interested and excited is important. As you go off into your mentor interactions, make sure to keep in tune with those non-verbal cues so that you can pivot the conversation when appropriate.

Body language is usually a strong indicator of what is going on in someone’s mind. Oftentimes when we are talking to others it becomes hard to be perceptive about what the other person is doing because we are so busy thinking about the next sentence we are going to say. Thus, it is often easier for co-founders or other people in the room to help with that, so lean on each other for help and in order to understand the dynamics of what is going on. If the body language of the mentor suggests that something wants to be said and you are still talking, then your mentor will probably forget what to say and you’ve lost out on a potential moment of insight.

To better facilitate your mentor interaction, focus on addressing the problems that your business is currently having, not the problems you think you might have next year, next month, or even next week.

Redirect Your Mentor

Sometimes you’re in the middle of a mentor meeting and the mentor will ask you questions that take you down a bit of a rabbit hole that you feel isn’t terribly productive. Probably the best way to make best use of your time is not to criticize the mentor, but rather to just redirect and say “I have a different question I’d like to bring up with you.” Usually the mentor will say something like, “Oh, okay, that’s great. Happy to help, happy to do that.”

However, what happens too frequently is that the entrepreneur doesn’t say anything early enough and then you get sucked so deep down the rabbit hole that it becomes an awkward conversation to pull somebody out of it. The best thing to do is to catch it early and say, “Hey that sounds really fascinating, but before we go down that rabbit hole can we just finish talking about this other thing?”

Ask Better Questions

Entrepreneurs tend to waste time during mentor meetings describing what they do and failing to articulate their problems. In fact, start-ups usually waste the most time in the mentor meeting talking, usually describing the business and what the business does. Two things that are wrong with that is that it’s all pitch, just about the good stuff, and the second thing is that it’s all about the product. Sometimes it takes a founder a whole thirty minutes of a thirty-minute long meeting to describe what they do.

Remember that you’re there to learn, to hear, to listen. So the less talking you do, the more value you will get out of it. So if you give a quick overview of your business and your product, that’s great, but do that as quickly as possible so that you can sink into the meat of the conversation you will be having. You have to give your mentor a clear question so that they can step in and be helpful. Help your mentor by giving them information that will enable them to add value, whether it be a list of features, problems, challenges, or ideas.

Come prepared to each mentor meeting with problem-specific questions for your mentor to help move your company forward. This is something you need to put thought into in order to get the most value. If you can’t bother to come up with strong questions, then you likely don’t deserve to take up the time your mentor is providing.

Build Relationships

The day-to-day business objectives are only a small piece of running a great company. Regardless of the mentor’s background, you can leverage their knowledge in other ways to grow as a leader. Always make sure you are developing lasting relationships with mentors who can help you overcome common struggles of entrepreneurship.

One of the things that is most overlooked in mentor-mentee relationships is chemistry. The truth is that you either have chemistry with your mentor or you don’t. If you don’t have chemistry with your mentor, that’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can still be helpful to somebody and you can still ask for help, but know that in those situations it can often be a little more transactional, which isn’t always bad. If you find somebody that you have really good chemistry with, on either side of the table, it’s a really good opportunity to go deeper because the mentor and mentee end up developing a lifelong relationship with one another that usually will never end. So be authentic. Be yourself. When you become authentically you, you will drive deeper and more meaningful relationships with your mentors, which will help you get a lot of value out of those relationships and will help you add a lot of value to them as well.

The most important thing in mentorship is chemistry, not background. Background can be really helpful, but it will mostly be helpful with the specifics of your business. However, the specifics of your business are only a small part of running a great company. The rest of it is hiring, strategy, and pricing; it’s not the specifics of the product or the industry itself. So if your mentor doesn’t have a background in it, you can leverage them and learn from them in other ways. You don’t need to convince them of the viability of the product itself. So that’s why truly understanding and getting data on mentor’s background and turning that data about their background into knowledge and wisdom about how to best engage with them is so critical.

A mentor may not know a single thing about your business but they can still be very helpful to you as founders in terms of the common struggles that most businesses face. You always want a reference point; you want to understand the basics, but you don’t need to go into the specific details. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just ask your mentor. Now, your entire co-founding team should strive to build a relationship with a mentor if they are present in the meeting. In other words, if you have three people in the room, those three people should be talking in the meeting. This preference, however, can vary by mentor. There isn’t a universal answer, but make sure to try out different communication dynamics to find a rhythm that works best for you.

Lastly, it’s crucial to remember that while these people may be your mentors now, they can one day become customers, investors, or even evangelists of your brand. Never undermine the future outcome of your mentor interactions. Build strong relationships!

Choose Carefully

You need mentors who will challenge you and provide an authentic, real-world perspective about running a business. Don’t surround yourself with yes-men or people pleasers who will add no value to your conversations. You want to look for mentors who will disagree with you instead of those who will always agree. The reason is that you need someone who will challenge you and your way of thinking by giving you new ideas.

Good mentors often think about telling their mentees things that nobody else is willing to tell them (the stuff nobody is willing to say) and they often do that out of love. A lot of the time, the mentors just want to give you a different perspective. Put in the time and effort to vet and choose the right mentors. Dig deeper into the conversations and gain real value from your mentor relationships. If they are the right fit for you, they will pay off in time.