During your session

By talking to hundreds of our mentors, we've found a few proven ways to have impactful mentorship sessions. Like all pieces of business school wisdom, we've also found an acronym to help you remember how to have career-defining one on ones. Here are the ABC's of mentorship: Action Items, Background Information, and Candidness.

Action Items

Action items allow for mentees and mentors to iterate on challenges together.

In your next session:
Define a few action items based on your discussion
Schedule a follow up for when you think you'll have results

Background Information

Make sure you've identified the key pieces of background information your mentor should know to help you solve your challenge. This is your opportunity to give your mentor a holistic view of your challenge: they don't know your manager, your coworkers, or your company. They have a blank slate with no biases. You can talk about how this challenge became an issue, how it makes you feel, what you've tried to solve it, and the results of these efforts.

In your next session:
Define what background information is crucial for the discussion
Share this information in your Session Notes or during the beginning of the call
Eliminate as much bias as you can to give a holistic picture of the situation

Candidness

Your mentor is someone who's lived in your shoes. They've had similar experiences at different points in their career, and they've joined Plato to pass on that knowledge. They want to give back to the community by helping people grow as leaders. Remember that no problem is too insignificant to talk to a mentor about: if it's something you struggle with, it's certainly something others have struggled with in their careers as well. Candidness and transparency are the cornerstones of trust. Among the longest mentorship relationships we've observed at Plato, the common thread has been that they feel psychologically safe to share any challenge with their mentor.

In your next session:
Think about what you're not telling your mentor and why
Ask for feedback on how you can be a better mentee

Collaborating with your mentor

The Session Whiteboard feature allows you to collaborate in real-time with your mentor, as if you were working from the same whiteboard. You can use this to take notes, provide more information before the call, and keep track of action items.

Discover something new during your session? Record your key insights to save that wisdom for later!

Additional Tips

Rate your session and provide feedback to your mentor

After the session, you'll be able to rate your session and provide feedback. Keep in mind, your mentor won't be able to see your rating: this is something Plato uses to make sure improve your experience. After rating your session, you can provide feedback directly to your mentor. Your mentor uses this feedback to make their sessions more enjoyable and productive, so it's important that you fill this out.

Updated on: 02/11/2021