1. In a “Knowledge Speaks” role, your mentee asks you questions that tap into your know-how and know-who. You’re the “librarian” who is offering domain expertise, and the relationship is usually limited to no more than a few meetings.

2. In a “Wisdom Listens” role, you lead with questions that are meant to facilitate awareness in your mentee. Your goal is to help your mentee develop as both a leader and a human (often with EQ being at the core of the learning). In this case, you’re the “confidante,” which one of my French mentees defines as “the one who gives confidence.” This relationship is usually longer in duration.

The question you should ask yourself as you consider mentoring someone is, “How can I best serve this person?” These two roles aren’t necessarily binary as many Knowledge relationships start veering in the Wisdom direction with time.

Over the past seven years, I’ve mentored more than 100 young people at Airbnb, so I found this two-role thinking to be helpful as I considered whether I had time to say “yes” to a potential mentee. It’s easy to have multiple Knowledge mentees simultaneously but hard to have more than a half-dozen Wisdom mentees at once.