Bangaly Kaba: evaluation

Transcript context

…So good. Following up on something else you talked about, which is mentors. Anytime someone talks about finding mentors, everyone's always, how do I find a mentor? What advice do you share with folks of how to find a mentor to help? You say once a week or once a month? Where I see people find the most success is they ask. They tell people what they're working on or what challenges they have and they say, "Do you know someone who I might be able to learn from who has done this or has good thinking about this recently?" So instead of just going to someone saying, "Hey, can you be a mentor?" Coming to me and say, "Hey, Bengaly, I'm actually trying to figure out how do I change the way this team operates because we need to go from this model to that model, but here's some of the challenges. So do you know someone who's actually really good at changing the way teams work or really good at communicating a new vision that I can talk to?" And so that I think is really important because what you do is you're creating a seed, and the seed is there's a triad and you have the person who's looking for the mentor. You have the recommender, the recommender, and then you have the potential mentor. And the recommender is basically saying, "Here, there's common purpose between the two of you and I can see it, and I think this is important, so I want you all to come together. " And that triad in that moment creates a higher affinity, highly likelihood that the person who needs the help and the person who you're connecting them with are going to see mutual benefit from one another. And I think I find that just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenge is, tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, "Hey, I like your style. Will you be my mentor?" So essentially share with folks you trust, here's what I'm working on. See if they recommend someone that could help you with that specific skill versus assuming that there's this person that can help you with this skill?…

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