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Request for Mentoring - Iteration Two
The second iteration of the RFM builds on top of the first version, and takes into consideration information hierarchy by graphically guiding the entrepreneur's eye from title to question to answer. You'll notice an addition of an icon that visually represents the interaction between mentor and entrepreneur. There is less wasted space and slightly more scaffolding guiding user input when compared to the first iteration.
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Back to Request for Mentoring page.
Request for Mentoring - Iteration One
The first iteration of the RFM captures the areas that the entrepreneur fills out ahead of the mentoring session. As the first version, this is the first attempt at putting the mentoring patterns observed into a physical form.
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Request for Mentoring
The Request for Mentoring (RFM) is designed to save time for the mentor.
While interviewing mentors, one of the problems that surfaced during
the interaction between mentor and entrepreneur is the large amount
of time a mentoring session takes up.
The RFM is based upon the mentoring pattern observed during mentoring sessions. The most important takeaway that applies to the RFM from the observations is the repetitive structure of mentoring conversations. Taking this pattern and making a form around it means that the entrepreneur may now communicate germane information to the mentor ahead of their meeting. Imagine a patient's form a doctor looks at as she determines where she should apply her medical expertise. The metaphor is the same – except that the startup isn't a sick patient...
Currently, the RFM is in the process of being applied to mentoring sessions to test out how much time is actually saved when the entrepreneur fills information in advance.
Iteration One
The RFM is based upon the mentoring pattern observed during mentoring sessions. The most important takeaway that applies to the RFM from the observations is the repetitive structure of mentoring conversations. Taking this pattern and making a form around it means that the entrepreneur may now communicate germane information to the mentor ahead of their meeting. Imagine a patient's form a doctor looks at as she determines where she should apply her medical expertise. The metaphor is the same – except that the startup isn't a sick patient...
Currently, the RFM is in the process of being applied to mentoring sessions to test out how much time is actually saved when the entrepreneur fills information in advance.
You can see and read about the various iterations of the RFM at their respective links:
How do Mentors Enable Entrepreneurial Learning?
In the previous section, I provided a
discussion on entrepreneurial learning. To understand how a business
mentor guides the entrepreneur's learning, we need to discuss the
three functions a business mentor normally plays in relation to an
entrepreneur. These functions enable entrepreneurial self-efficacy;
however, a smaller category of these functions, I'll argue, also
enable entrepreneurial learning. Essentially, I will attempt to show
that entrepreneurial learning is enabled through mentorship by the
information support, confrontation, guide, and role-model functions.
Etienne St-jean, an expert in the field
of business mentorship, presents three major functions the mentor
plays: the psychological, the career-related, and the
role model function. These three major functions have several
sub-functions and were determined from a study documenting and
analyzing mentor mentee relationships that lasted an average of 16.06
months (standard deviation: 14.4, median: 13) with the mean and
average frequency of meetings at once a month and just under a month,
respectively, and an average meeting time of 68.52 minutes (standard
deviation: 14.4, mean: 67) (2).
The psychological sub-functions include
reflector, reassurance, motivation, and confidant. The mentor as a
reflector, provides feedback on the entrepreneur's strengths
and weaknesses, providing a space to identify these strengths that
can be leveraged and weaknesses that should be worked on. The mentor
as reassurance, aids the entrepreneur in difficult times when
problems need to be put into perspective. The mentor as a motivator
builds the entrepreneur's self-confidence in his abilities. The
mentor as a confidant creates a safe space where entrepreneur
may confide in the mentor (2).
The career-related sub-functions
include integration, information support, confrontation, and guide.
The mentor as integrator facilitates introductions with
various business contacts; and on average, the study learned that
mentors introduced the entrepreneurs to 3.44 persons, with a standard
deviation of 3.47). The mentor as information support provides
provides strategic business advice based on personal experience and
knowledge. The mentor as confrontation, the mentor confronts
the entrepreneur's beliefs and ideas such that the entrepreneur may
learn to overcome any beliefs or ideas that may prevent the
entrepreneur from accomplishing his goals. The mentor as a guide
provides a big picture perspective to help the entrepreneur
understand the context they're building a business in (2).
The last category, the role model
function does not have any sub-functions. The mentor as a role
model focuses on the mentor's life stories to be used as examples
for the entrepreneur to learn from (2).
The mentor in a long-term relationship
with an entrepreneur should also be focusing on increasing
entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is believing in the
efficacy of ones own skills. Thus, entrepreneurial self-efficacy is
the entrepreneur's belief that she has sufficient skill to tackle the
problem at hand. In a study done by Etienne St-jean, he discovered
there's a positive correlation when a mentor encourages
entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the entrepreneur has increased job
satisfaction and have a higher intention to stay as a career
entrepreneur (3).
Applying These Concepts to my
Thesis:
Since I've only observed short-term
mentoring relationships, or at least the beginnings of possibly
longer relationships, not all of these functions have been observed
during the process of this thesis. The sub-functions observed include
integrator, information support, confrontation, guide, and role
model. During the interactions between mentor and entrepreneur, the
career related and role modeling functions have been observed. The
psychological functions have not clearly been observed.
The sub-functions information support,
confrontation, and guide are most directly related to entrepreneurial
learning. Even though this vocabulary isn't used throughout the
thesis, these sub-functions informed what to observe when making
sense of how mentoring interactions enable entrepreneurial learning.
Takeaway:
Entrepreneurial learning is enabled
through mentorship by the information support, confrontation, guide,
and role-model functions.
Sources:
- Cull, John. “Mentoring Young Entrepreneurs: What Leads to Success?”
- St-Jean, Etienne. “Mentoring Functions for Novice Entrepreneurs”
- St-Jean, Etienne. “The Influence of Mentoring on Mentee's Satisfaction and Career: The Role of Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy”
Observations of Mentor-Entrepreneur Interactions
I've noticed two types of interactions
between mentors and entrepreneurs: serendipitous and planned.
Serendipitous meetings between mentor and entrepreneur tend to occur
at networking events, events like Startup Weekend or Philly TechMeetup, or even at coffee shops. Just as the word implies,
serendipitous is unplanned, and even though neither party knows they
are going to be in the same space at the same time, they discuss
business and the mentor provides advice. Planned meetings between
mentor and entrepreneur tends to occur over the phone, Skype, or
face-to-face in office space or even a coffee shop. Planned meetings
are more secluded and are set for a specified amount of time when
compared to serendipitous meetings. When performing these
observations, I asked myself what is required for learning to occur? I conjectured that it must be a safe mental space. To answer this question and test the validity of this statement, I looked for evidence of the emotional states during the interaction between mentor and entrepreneur to see if I could determine whether the entrepreneur was receiving business feedback in a safe mental space. Even though this statement helped guide my observations, in the end, the observations were useful in designing the prototypes for serendipitous and planned interactions.
Serendipitous Interactions:
One of the major patterns observed
amongst serendipitous mentoring is a reflection of affect between the
mentor and entrepreneur. If one individual was laughing the other did
as well, if one individual was serious as was the other.
I’ve
learned from observing several unstructured and spontaneous mentoring
in action, that a similarity in affect creates a social lubricant
creating a safe mental space. Once this safe mental space is created,
the feedback provided by the mentor was usually better received. At
it’s most basic, this observation is simply a factor of how humans
interact and communicate. Let me provide two examples of the same
entrepreneur. In the picture below from Startup Weekend, both the
entrepreneur and mentor were relaxed when the entrepreneur was
receiving feedback on marketing and marketing strategies. After the
meeting, the entrepreneur felt confident, calm, and had a sense of
self-efficacy.
During the follow interaction depicted
in the picture below, the mentor and entrepreneur were both tense.
The mentor was providing feedback on the entrepreneur's product, and
what channels of distribution they're using to reach their customers.
After this interaction, the entrepreneur felt confused and
frustrated. He was unsure about what channel of distribution to
incorporate into his business model and presentation to the judges at
Startup Weekend.
Planned Interactions:
While observing planned mentor
interactions, I discovered four distinct steps that the interaction
followed – an in-depth analysis of these four steps can be readabout in the next section because it lays the foundation for the
Request for Mentoring Form. The part that I will discuss here are the
emotional states I observed when the mentor began probing the
entrepreneur about his business.
I'll pull data from one of the
interactions I observed to serve as an example. The entrepreneur was
asking about when he should raise funds and the terms associated with
raising investment funds. To answer the question about when he should
raise funds, the mentor then began asking questions about how the
entrepreneur had acquired a hospital as a customer. The startup is
building an app for doctors. The mentor followed up with how quickly
the entrepreneur can acquire new hospitals as customers. The mentor
then walked the entrepreneur through a set of scenarios based on
assumptions of how quickly the entrepreneur can acquire new
customers. When the meeting was over, the mentor was telling the
entrepreneur that the business he's starting is valuable and the
business has potential.
There are three distinct emotional
states I noticed in the interaction between the entrepreneur and
mentor. The first emotional state is calm because the entrepreneur is
bringing the mentor up to speed on the current state of his business.
The second emotional state is anxiety because the mentor is pulling
out of the entrepreneur, the information she sees relevant to
answering the question, to provide feedback, and to give strategic
advice. The third emotional state is encouragement because the mentor
provides encouragement to the entrepreneur about the business he's
starting and the problem he's solving. However, there's a limitation
to what I've observed about the third emotional state. During
serendipitous mentoring interactions, the third emotional state went
one of two ways: either no encouragement or encouragement. Since I've
only observed four of these planned meetings, it's possible that it
can also end with no encouragement, and I conjecture that there would
be no closure to the anxiety that surfaces during the second
emotional state.
What is Entrepreneurial Learning?
In the previous section, I concluded
that an entrepreneur is the role a person fills to create and manage
a business to generate value for a customer. This implies that
entrepreneurial learning is the learning that occurs while filling
the entrepreneur's role. Since this thesis is studying and designing
around the learning mentors provide for entrepreneurs, a definition
needs to be developed that serves the purpose of guiding this thesis
around the learning mentors provide for entrepreneurs. I will begin
with an overview of various definitions of entrepreneurial learning,
I'll then take what can be used from them, and finally, I will end
with a discussion on why entrepreneurial learning matters for
mentors.
In “Entrepreneurial Learning: a
narrative-based conceptual model,” David Rae identifies three major
areas that play a factor in the entrepreneur's learning: personal and
social emergence, contextual learning, and negotiated enterprise.
Personal and social emergence is the creation of the individual's
self-perception as an entrepreneur. Essentially, believing that one's
person can turn an idea into reality. Contextual learning is the use
of one's knowledge and experience within an industry or community to
recognize opportunities that ventures can be formed around.
Negotiated enterprise is the process of engaging with other people to
exchange labor, ideas, learned strategies, or capital (2).
Peter Erdelyi argues that
entrepreneurial learning has two branches: one that involves personal
learning and another that involves collective learning. Personal
learning is focuses on the individual and her experiences, and is the
process of “opportunity recognition” and constitutes the
“cognitive mechanisms for identifying entrepreneurial business
opportunities and making decisions about them” (3). Collective
learning arises from the interaction of individuals within a firm or
within an ecosystem. Both modes of learning give rise to behaviors
that encourages the entrepreneur to acquire and use resources
available within her network (3)
Berglund,
Hellstrom, and Sjolander propose a model of entrepreneurial learning
as a forward oscillation between two modes: hypothesis testing and
hermeneutic learning. Hypothesis testing is coming up with an
hypothesis and then preparing an experiment that allows to test the
validity and soundness of the hypothesis, thus leading to learning.
Hermeneutic learning, in contrast to hypothesis testing, occurs
experientially and is tacit to the actions the entrepreneur makes.
The entrepreneurs and the collection of individuals that comprise a
startup, then fluctuate between these two states as they accumulate
incremental knowledge about the product they're building, the
customer's they're building it for, the market they're operating in,
etc (1). Even though Berglund et al propose this model of
entrepreneurial learning as a way to explain how venture capitalists
influence entrepreneurial behavior, I think taking this model can be
used within the context of a mentoring relationship to make obvious
the entrepreneur's learning behaviors.
These researchers
all hit upon a dichotomy between the individual and the networks
they're a part of. The relationships the entrepreneur has with those
internal to the startup and those external to the startup seems to
determine the behaviors she learns, the opportunities she can
recognize, and the opportunities she can act upon. What I mean is
that entrepreneurial activity is inherently social in nature – it's
both limited and enabled by the network the entrepreneur is a part
of. It's limited by the size of the network and those she can learn
from, and enabled by the people she's in contact with because she can
learn new business strategies from her fellow entrepreneurs. This
means that for the context of this thesis, mentors with business
experience existing in the entrepreneur's network enable the learning
of new strategies, behaviors, and can increase the size of the
entrepreneur's network via introductions to new contacts.
Entrepreneurial learning, from a mentoring perspective, is a feedback
process to develop new strategies the entrepreneur can execute upon
to continue managing her business.
The next section
will go into a discussion of the different ways a mentor enables
entrepreneurial learning.
Sources:
- Berglund, Henrik, Tomas Hellstrom, Soren Sjolander. "Entrepreneurial Learning and the Role of Venture Capitalists." Venture Capital July 2007: Vol. 9, No. 3, 165 - 181.
- Rae, David. "Entrepreneurial learning: a narrative-based conceptual model." Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development 2005. Vol. 12 No. 3, 323 - 335.
- Erdelyi, Peter. "The Matter of Entrepreneurial Learning: A Literature Review."
A Mentoring Pattern Discovered
A pattern surfaced while observing mentoring sessions. Irregardless of the strategic area being discussed, I discovered that the flow of conversations between mentor and entrepreneur unfolded the same way. The conversation followed a four step process: strategic area, known facts and data, tried and tested strategies, and possible scenarios. For example, one mentoring session I observed, the entrepreneur was asking about when to raise funds. The mentor then narrowed in on how the entrepreneur had acquired their current customers - that the entrepreneur's father was a doctor at a certain hospital, and they leveraged his connections to beta test an app. After discussing strategies and data they had acquired while beta testing the app, the mentor walked the entrepreneur through a series of possible outcomes based on assumptions of how quickly they can acquire customers.
This newly discovered pattern can be leveraged to save time for both mentors and entrepreneurs. One application of this pattern is to prefill some of the information ahead of time so that the mentor can quickly aid the entrepreneur in building possible scenarios.
What is a Startup?
The Kauffman Foundation in the study, The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction, defined a startup as any firm that's younger than one year (1). However, this umbrella term covers all types of startups irregardless of industry, and is too broad to use for this thesis. The working definition for this thesis is similar to the Startup Genome. They define a startup as “a developmental organism that evolves along five interdependent dimensions: Customer, Product, Team, Business Model and Financials" (2). This means that a startup is either an individual or a small group of people working on solving a problem by starting a business. The differences in my definition is that I add five more dimensions that I've surveyed and observed entrepreneurs managing in order to grow their startup. These ten areas are business development, customer development, finance, fundraising, legal, marketing, operations, product development, sales, and team.
Eric Ries in The Lean Startup defines a startup as “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty” (3). His definition is along similar lines as the Startup Genome's except that he includes the startup's environment: "conditions of extreme uncertainty." The "uncertainty" is an important aspect to the definition because it captures the fact that a startup lives or dies by how well it acquires and retains customers. The definition of a startup for this thesis combines both the Startup Genome's and Ries' definition with the aforementioned survey and observations.
Definition:
A startup is a human institution that evolves under conditions of extreme uncertainty along ten interdependent dimensions (business development, customer development, finance, fundraising, legal, marketing, operations, product development, sales, and team) to create a new product or service for a specific customer/user group.
I think this is a useful definition for mentoring because it reveals the strategic areas that mentors can provide business advice.
The types of startups studied and entrepreneurs interviewed for this thesis have all been within the information technology industry.
Back to Table of Contents.
Sources:
Eric Ries in The Lean Startup defines a startup as “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty” (3). His definition is along similar lines as the Startup Genome's except that he includes the startup's environment: "conditions of extreme uncertainty." The "uncertainty" is an important aspect to the definition because it captures the fact that a startup lives or dies by how well it acquires and retains customers. The definition of a startup for this thesis combines both the Startup Genome's and Ries' definition with the aforementioned survey and observations.
Definition:
A startup is a human institution that evolves under conditions of extreme uncertainty along ten interdependent dimensions (business development, customer development, finance, fundraising, legal, marketing, operations, product development, sales, and team) to create a new product or service for a specific customer/user group.
I think this is a useful definition for mentoring because it reveals the strategic areas that mentors can provide business advice.
The types of startups studied and entrepreneurs interviewed for this thesis have all been within the information technology industry.
Back to Table of Contents.
Sources:
- The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction, Kauffman Foundation
- Startup Genome Report Extra on Premature Scaling, August 29th, 2011
- The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
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