How We Grade Our TechStar Mentors
We’ve had a chance recently to think about what makes good teacher/student match in the special case where students can choose from a surfeit of great teachers, and we wanted to share the dimensions we think make for a good match.
Here at Testive we just began a program called TechStars. TechStars provides young companies with a three month period of focused mentorship from a variety of experienced professionals in Boston. The first two weeks have been a flurry of rapid-fire meeting with a dozen plus people to identify the few who are the right match for us as people and our company at this place in its life.
While mentors are teachers, we like the term ‘mentor’ because it reinforces the idea that the learning relationship is two-sided. The student should give just as much to the mentor as he or she takes from them.
I-Trap is the grading rubric we developed to evaluate a good mentor/mentee match from our point of view. It forces us to breakdown our level of fit with a mentor across five dimensions. Remember that this isn't a tool for evaluating people. This is a tool we use to help us think about whom we can learn the most from and who can learn the most from us.
How one rates a person on these categories is deeply personal. We fully expect that someone who isn't a match for us on one category will be stellar for someone else on the same dimension. We know that because everyone we've met here is basically stellar in general.
Here’s how it breaks down:
Insight
How much insight does the mentor seem to have into our problems as a business or us as people? For some this comes from experience. For others it's just because they think about problems in a way that really resonates to us.
Trust
How much do we trust that this person is telling us what she or he really thinks? How much do we trust that when they have something difficult to say, they will say it sooner rather than later?
Relevant Experience
Socrates may have been the greatest teacher in history. He probably wouldn’t have much to say about the dynamics of the 21st century educational technology market. Still, if you can land Socrates as an adviser, we suggest taking advantage of the opportunity.
Availability
We’ve all committed to things that we just couldn’t follow through on. The best intentioned people may just not have the time. No shame in that. Talented people are busy.
Personal Connection
Do we have a personal connection?
A few things we’ve noticed
It’s not personal. Grading matches across different dimensions helps us find people who can teach us great stuff, but whom we might have dismissed because there wasn’t an immediate personal connection.
It’s personal. If you can never get to a personal connection, it’s really hard to build a good mentor relationship.
Your assessment of others says everything about you and virtually nothing about them. One person may have fabulous insight that we (for whatever reason) just aren’t able to hear because it isn't expressed in a certain way. On the other hand, people who we think are brilliant may not feel insightful to another team. How you score someone reflects what you value as a person, not any empirical measure of quality.
It’s important for multiple people to write down their impressions before saying a single word to each other about the potential mentor. If multiple people meet the potential mentor, they must write their impressions before saying anything to each other. If we even say a single word about the meeting, our assessments are much more likely to be identical. Then we miss the chance to talk about what created the difference
Scoring isn’t a good tool to rank people, but it’s a great tool to create productive conversation. The most insight we get into ourselves and our own values comes from the conversations we have about why we gave people different scores.
It’s not about the best people, it’s about the best team. We grade everyone on all these measures across a 1-5 scale. We'd rather have relationships with advisers who each are a great fit in one of these categories (and suck at the rest) than one who is pretty good match across most dimensions.
How you can use this with your teachers?
Have a teacher you don’t like? Think about which one of these criteria they fall flat on. Maybe you just don’t like them on a personal level, but you can use this to remind yourself that they have other qualities that make them a valuable resource in your life.
If you have the luxury of picking a teacher or adviser or mentor or coach, remember all the dimensions and try to find someone (or better yet multiple people) who can fill all of these needs.
Photo courtesy: Nathan Russell
