How Do Fish Mate? - A Case for Executive Mentors

So how do fish mate? The female fish lays her eggs in a secure place in the water and the male fish comes and sprays the general area with sperms. After which it is left to chance based on the sperms finding the eggs and fertilizing them.

We studied several business advisory and mentoring organizations, and therefore understand what it takes to make the MentorSquare CompleMentor service more useful to you. One of the major findings of our research is the process of matching mentees (persons seeking business advice) to one or more mentors who could provide relevant and contextual advice was, in most cases, arbitrary as well as serendipitous. Not too much different from how fish mate, I am confident you will agree!

In order to make our process more effective, predictable and structured, we have evolved a unique delivery model at MentorSquare.

Every Member who joins the MentorSquare CompleMentor program is assigned an Executive Mentor (EM). An EM is a senior mentor with several years of experience in business who can serve as a General Physician for the Member, and is the first person that the Member connects up with to consult and discuss a business situation that the member might wish to get advice on. Your EM will be automatically included in every conversation you post. You may also dialogues with your EM via the platform or by mail.

The EM may be able to help you analyze the issue and provider pointers on how to proceed. In cases where the EM cannot resolve the situation or feel that there are other Mentors who can add value to the conversation, the EM will recommend inviting other Mentors to the conversation. The EM will help frame the situation in a fashion that brings the best engagement and responses from other Mentors who are coming into the conversation cold. The EMs will also recommend a list of Mentors to invite into a conversation to get the best set of viewpoints. And finally, the EM helps converge the varied viewpoints to a coherent plan, and will recommend when a conversation needs to be closed, or migrated to a new conversation.

The EMs are the face of MentorSquare for the Members. The EMs work to understand the member's situation, their challenges and their enterprises as best as possible. They are the first to reach out to the Member to bring him or her on-board. They will work with the Member to best develop and post their profiles, create background document and get conversations going in order to create a rich learning and interaction experience on the platform. They are the Members best friend, guide and philosopher.

It takes two hands to clap; while your EM will do his best to maximize your leverage of the MentorSquare platform, you need to invest the time and effort to work with the EM in providing information, and following the guidelines and processes that you jointly agree to follow.

My colleagues in the EM community may take exception to my using the fish-mating analogy to describe their role at MentorSquare. So let me make another attempt with a more flattering explanation. Several thousand years ago when Hinduism was developing in India the majority of lay people found it tough to understand and practice Hinduism. Hinduism did not develop as a religion but a way of life, so there were no hard nor fast rules. With advent of people of other religions showing up in the Indian subcontinent and other structured religions developing in India, the elders of Hinduism needed better ways of connecting with the masses. So deities, idols, temples and rituals became more important to provide structure. So EMs are our local idols in the communities! Today MentorSquare has Indian idols, Singapore idols, Malaysian idols and American idols to help you become an ardent follower of MentorSquare :-)