🥁 The OffBeat #109: What Advice Do I Give My Mentees?

Call-and-response musical style mentorship

The OffBeat is where music meets leadership. I’m Allison Stadd—jazz drummer, marketing leader, and highly caffeinated mom of two—sharing fresh takes on work, creativity, and connection. Think HBR, but with better taste in music.

Opening Note | A track that captures the vibe of this edition of The OffBeat:

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There’s a ton of thought leadership afoot on finding a mentor, working with a mentor, and getting the most out of a mentor.

But not a lot about how to be a mentor.

If you’re in a mentorship role, you’ve got wisdom to share. You have hard-won learnings from your experiences that a mentee is lucky to glean from you.

But, er, how exactly does that gleaning work?

When a well-prepared mentee comes to a mentorship chat prepared with questions or discussion prompts, does your brain boil over with a pasta pot’s worth of thoughts, memories, reactions?

That happens to me a lot, especially these days with a high-octane job, two little kids, and the heavy load of headlines about democracy, the planet, and the future my kids will inherit.

How do you distill all of those cognitive noodles into a clear, cogent, perfectly al dente dinner?

Every mentor (at least the good ones—and you’re a good one if you’re in The OffBeat community) wants to be maximally helpful. If not, you’re wasting both your and your mentee’s time and energy.

You want them to leave any mentorship conversation feeling fired up, or calmed down, or inspired, or some combo of those.

But it’s not so easy, on top of everything else on your plate and on your mind, to impart the right kind of guidance, on the spot, to the people who need it most.

So let’s get into the weeds/noodles.

In music, call-and-response is one of the oldest forms of communication.

One voice calls.

Another answers.

Something cool happens in that back-and-forth rhythm.

That’s exactly how I’ve come to think about mentorship.

When I first started mentoring, I thought my job was to ✨perform✨; to share my best lessons, to package my stories into neat takeaways, to slide wisdom across the table like sheet music.

But over time I realized that the most meaningful conversations weren’t solo performances. They were rich interplays.

Here’s an example of a text exchange very similar to one I had recently with a mentee (adjusted for privacy):

MENTEE: Ugh, I cannot read my boss. No idea what she’s thinking.

MENTOR: Been there! I had a manager early on who never reacted, and also took forever to respond to messages. I thought I was getting fired half the time. One thing that helped: asking at the end of meetings something like “On a scale of 1–10, how aligned are we?” Try it.

MENTEE: OK I’ll test it out 👍

(a week later)

MENTEE: Tried the 1–10 thing. Boss answered 8 but then just stared at me. I froze 😬

MENTOR: That’s actually good data. Follow up with → “What would get us to a 10?”
Forces clarity. You can even make it playful/casual: “What’s the extra credit assignment here?”

MENTEE: Haha love that. Will use.

MENTOR: Cool. Remember managing up isn’t about mind-reading. It’s about making it easy for them to make it clear what matters to them. Keep testing stuff until you find what sticks.

The beauty of call-and-response is that it’s alive. It leaves space for improvisation, for discovery in the moment.

And it ensures both the mentor and mentee are engaged.

As an exec, I’ve seen how tempting it is to rattle off “greatest hits” advice, i.e. the same three stories you always tell about career growth or navigating tough meetings.

But mentoring isn’t about pressing play on some dive bar jukebox. It’s about listening deeply enough to respond like a bandmate.

Mentorship, just like music, is less about the exact notes you play and more about the beautiful spaces in between.

Here’s how to make your next mentoring conversation more call-and-response-esque, more alive and useful.

🥁 HIT IT:
The next time you’re in a conversation with a mentee, don’t default to canned advice. Treat it like musical call-and-response: alive, improvised, tailored to the moment.

Here’s how to try it in practice:

Start with their call. Open with: “What’s on your mind right now?” or “Where are you feeling stuck?” Let them shape where the conversation goes.

Respond to that, not everything. Instead of unloading a career’s worth of advice, share one story, one tool, or one question that builds directly on what they just said.

Keep the back-and-forth alive. Before wrapping the conversation, ask: “What feels most useful from this chat?” or “What will you try next?” That turns the session into an evolving loop instead of a one-off download.

Real-time, co-created mentorship guidance is the kind that—like an earworm in music!—tends to stick.

Have a great week,

Allison

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