Some thoughts on the “Systematising mentorship” stuff:
My impression is that WANBAM and Effective Thesis have essentially done some things that are similar to some of the things proposed in this section of this post. I imagine other EA- or EA-aligned orgs/people might’ve done so as well, in addition to presumably many non-EA orgs/people. So there might be a lot that could be learned from their approaches, successes, failures, thinking, etc.
In a recent podcast interview, Rob Wiblin and Spencer Greenberg proposed a potentially easier way to capture part of the benefits that “Systematising mentorship” would also aim to capture: Just setting up weekly meetings with someone else who’s at roughly the same level of seniority and who also wants more “management”/”mentorship”
I summarised some of what they said about that here
This of course wouldn’t capture all the benefits of getting mentorship from a person with more expertise in an area than the mentee has, but it might capture the benefits that basically just require any “line manager” type person
“A paid mentorship program could harm other mentorship programs and organic mentoring in the community by setting up an expectation that people providing mentorship be paid.” That does seem to me plausible and worth noting.
But it also seems plausible that a paid mentorship could lead to people coming to see mentorship in general (even when provided for free) as more a more valuable, desired, “substantial” way of being helpful and having impact. And that could perhaps lead to more mentorship being offered, it being offered by higher-calibre mentors, or mentors being more motivated (again, even when the mentorship is free.)
On the other hand, the existence of some paid mentorship could also lead to people implicitly assuming that free mentorship is lower quality or something like that, which could have bad effects (e.g., leading to less supply of and demand for free mentorship).
(I’m therefore not sure what the net effect of this consideration would be.)
>Just setting up weekly meetings with someone else who’s at roughly the same level of seniority and who also wants more “management”/”mentorship”
I really like this idea. I had a set up like this when I had a hands off manager, with a friend who didn’t have a manager. I found it really helpful. For others who are keen on this but don’t have a particular friend they’d like to do it with, there’s a Facebook group for finding such accountability partners.
Thanks for this post.
Some thoughts on the “Systematising mentorship” stuff:
My impression is that WANBAM and Effective Thesis have essentially done some things that are similar to some of the things proposed in this section of this post. I imagine other EA- or EA-aligned orgs/people might’ve done so as well, in addition to presumably many non-EA orgs/people. So there might be a lot that could be learned from their approaches, successes, failures, thinking, etc.
In a recent podcast interview, Rob Wiblin and Spencer Greenberg proposed a potentially easier way to capture part of the benefits that “Systematising mentorship” would also aim to capture: Just setting up weekly meetings with someone else who’s at roughly the same level of seniority and who also wants more “management”/”mentorship”
I summarised some of what they said about that here
This of course wouldn’t capture all the benefits of getting mentorship from a person with more expertise in an area than the mentee has, but it might capture the benefits that basically just require any “line manager” type person
“A paid mentorship program could harm other mentorship programs and organic mentoring in the community by setting up an expectation that people providing mentorship be paid.” That does seem to me plausible and worth noting.
But it also seems plausible that a paid mentorship could lead to people coming to see mentorship in general (even when provided for free) as more a more valuable, desired, “substantial” way of being helpful and having impact. And that could perhaps lead to more mentorship being offered, it being offered by higher-calibre mentors, or mentors being more motivated (again, even when the mentorship is free.)
On the other hand, the existence of some paid mentorship could also lead to people implicitly assuming that free mentorship is lower quality or something like that, which could have bad effects (e.g., leading to less supply of and demand for free mentorship).
(I’m therefore not sure what the net effect of this consideration would be.)
>Just setting up weekly meetings with someone else who’s at roughly the same level of seniority and who also wants more “management”/”mentorship”
I really like this idea. I had a set up like this when I had a hands off manager, with a friend who didn’t have a manager. I found it really helpful. For others who are keen on this but don’t have a particular friend they’d like to do it with, there’s a Facebook group for finding such accountability partners.