The people I know of who are best at mentorship are quite busy. As far as I can tell, they are already putting effort into mentoring and managing people. Mentorship and management also both directly trade off against other high value work they could be doing.
There are people with more free time, but those people are also less obviously qualified to mentor people. You can (and probably should) have people across the EA landscape mentoring each other. But, you need to be realistic about how valuable this is, and how much it enables EA to scale.
Slight push back here in that I’ve seen plenty of folks who make good mentors but who wouldn’t be doing a lot of mentoring if not for systems in place to make that happen (because they stop doing it once they aren’t within whatever system was supporting their mentoring), which makes me think there’s a large supply of good mentors who just aren’t connected in ways that help them match with people to mentor.
This suggests a lot of the difficulty with having enough mentorship is that the best mentors need to not only be good at mentoring but also be good at starting the mentorship relationship. Plenty of people, it seems though, can be good mentors if someone does the matching part for them and creates the context between them and the mentees.
That is helpful, thanks. I’ve been sitting on this post for years and published it yesterday while thinking generally about “okay, but what do we do about the mentorship bottleneck? how much free energy is there?”, and “make sure that starting-mentorship is frictionless” seems like an obvious mechanism to improve things.
Slight push back here in that I’ve seen plenty of folks who make good mentors but who wouldn’t be doing a lot of mentoring if not for systems in place to make that happen (because they stop doing it once they aren’t within whatever system was supporting their mentoring), which makes me think there’s a large supply of good mentors who just aren’t connected in ways that help them match with people to mentor.
This suggests a lot of the difficulty with having enough mentorship is that the best mentors need to not only be good at mentoring but also be good at starting the mentorship relationship. Plenty of people, it seems though, can be good mentors if someone does the matching part for them and creates the context between them and the mentees.
That is helpful, thanks. I’ve been sitting on this post for years and published it yesterday while thinking generally about “okay, but what do we do about the mentorship bottleneck? how much free energy is there?”, and “make sure that starting-mentorship is frictionless” seems like an obvious mechanism to improve things.