“Paper Dolls” photo by Max Pixel

How to run your own mentoring ring

In celebration of Women’s History month I thought I would finally get around to posting about how to run your own mentoring ring. I’ve had a few people ask me about this over the years and I’ve always intended to write this article but as things go — life gets busy. But as this month is also the 2 year anniversary of my mom’s passing and it’s also the birthday month of both my girls I think it’s finally time to share. Let’s celebrate the women of the past who were pioneers, change agents, leaders by paying it forward and helping others in our local circles.

So what is this mentoring rings thing you ask?

Mentoring rings at least for me was born out of this idea we had many years ago while I was still at Microsoft in the Silicon Valley campus — that there aren’t enough senior female leaders in tech to go around as mentors. And yet there were so many talented women on campus. Why not pull a group together and learn from each other? We certainly all had unique skills and experiences to share with the group — and in doing so we could lift each other up instead of waiting for that unicorn leader to be the all encompassing gift from the heavens to unload that wealth of wisdom and experience. I have Martha Galley and Kris Olsen to thank for experimenting with this loosely formed idea of a program and being transparent with the participants that they pulled together for this trial run. They were clear — it was an experiment — it hadn’t been done before. Let’s see what we can get out of it. I met some wonderful women in that program and learned much from the experience.

Martha and Kris did some magic behind the scenes and found a set of women who were at relatively the same levels in their careers and showed great potential. We were matched with a partner and took a topic to research and present on in an upcoming session. Some of these sessions were great — some a bit rough, and some that didn’t happen due to scheduling issues. Some of our discussions devolved a bit into support group chatter, and some where we didn’t really have the answers. But we were on the journey together and there was a nugget of learning in every session if you were engaged. It certainly left an impression on me and I was grateful for the opportunity to meet some amazing women.

Years later when I was at Atlassian building a Developer Relations organization, I decided to drive some diversity initiatives on the side at our San Francisco office. I kicked off with a Women in Tech talk series where I invited speakers both internally and externally to share their wisdom, and lessons learned over their career with others. I started with Martha Galley who was then a VP at Salesforce and we revisited the topic of mentoring rings. That created a great starting point for me to kick off recruitment for our first mentoring ring at Atlassian, and an opportunity for me to put a bit more structure around the idea so that it could be repeated easily.

How to run one:

Step 0: Do a lunch and learn — talk about what mentoring rings are, the benefits, goals of the program, your intended timeframe for running it, and what levels you are generally recruiting for — entry, mid, senior level? Keep them in the same range. Introduce the idea of “paying it forward” — that ideally every participant after the program runs a mentoring ring of their own.

Step 1: Recruit. Generally speaking you’ll want to recruit participants who are at about the same level in their careers. Peer mentoring conversations are best when participants are sharing similar complexities of challenges and learnings. Keep the size of the ring 12 people or less including facilitators. The reason for this is to keep the conversations authentic, intimate and confidential. The larger the group — the harder it is to have those honest conversations. At Atlassian I of course kicked off the recruiting through Confluence. :) I ran an internal survey asking who was interested and what their general career level was at that time. I also used that survey to confirm the date ranges the program would run.

Make sure you have a co-facilitator. In an ideal world the facilitators are a level higher than the participants but being at the participant level works as well. You aren’t expected as the facilitator to be the mentor — this is all about peer mentoring. I liked the idea of having two facilitators — technically you really only need one but having two people to balance the conversation as well as that backup in case one is sick keeps things moving. One of your main responsibilities as the facilitator is to ensure everyone has the calendar invite for every session and a room booked.

Step 2: Facilitators run the first orientation meeting with the new ring group. Kick it off — set expectations about commitment and confidentiality of the discussions. Go around the room and get to know each other. Have each of the participants throw up topics they are interested in on the whiteboard. Then take a few minutes to vote on them. Based on the most popular topics have participants partner up on the two topics they are most interested in driving. Make sure they mix things up and have different partners for each topic. Then to make things concrete schedule your sessions while you’re still in that first meeting. Reaffirm commitment to do it because it’s good for everyone — including the facilitators. It’s a unique learning opportunity that is never the same from ring to ring.

Sample topics I’ve seen run through the rings — it’s really up to the participants what they want to drive and learn:

• Public speaking
• Managing up
• Leading through influence
• Negotiating
• Managing through conflict
• Managing and growing your career

When scheduling, I recommend running it over lunch so that you avoid conflicts with other meetings, and scheduling the sessions every two weeks or once a month to give each team enough time to prepare. I have to say how super impressed I was with the ring we had at Atlassian — each member was super committed and really created high quality content for each session.

Step 3: Have the participants run the sessions. As the facilitator act as the glue to the conversations but let the participants exercise their leadership skills in running the sessions. Encourage creativity — they can practice public speaking by doing a formal presentation on the topic, or run it as a workshop, or invite guest speakers for the topic. We had a pair create a fun, interactive game around the topic. Skies the limit! Help keep the conversation moving across the group. Keep an eye out for the quiet ones and find comfortable ways to get them engaged.

Tips for running your ring:

Make sure everyone is really committed to going to each session. Set the tone of code of silence — what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Give folks options to video conference in if they are traveling. Run it during lunch to avoid meeting conflicts.

As the facilitator help the folks who are running the topic as needed. Make sure everyone has an opportunity to engage in the conversation. Don’t act as the expert but encourage others to share their experiences and learnings.

Some learnings:

• I was thrilled after running the ring at Atlassian that the majority of participants were motivated to go and run subsequent rings. What I loved even more was that several of them wanted to extend the rings concept to their male colleagues and make it a general career development concept for everyone. What we learned from that though was the difficulty in having those open intimate, conversations about challenges in our careers. The dynamics were very different and it was difficult to build trust in some of the groups. I do think that mentoring rings applies generally to career development and not just for women in tech. We had some folks later on who wanted to do one specific to product management or engineering which was wonderful. Just be transparent and clear what your goals are for your ring so that your participants know what they are getting.
• In our rings at Microsoft some of our sessions didn’t work out because of scheduling conflicts — this was one of the reasons we ran it over lunch at Atlassian. For folks who were traveling we offered them conferencing options and that worked well because by default those were always with video and not just audio. We also made a concerted effort in ensuring that the remote participant was included in the conversations.
• Bring your ring group together for social functions — celebrate your joint learnings outside of the ring sessions. Reinforce those special relationships you’ve built.
• Ensure you have participants from across the organization. Not only do you learn about the topics specifically at hand, but you learn about other teams and their challenges. Those relationships can come in handy in the future.
• When you form your ring ensure there are no manager/employee relationships. It’s hard to have confidential discussions if your manager or team lead is in the same group.
• Reschedules happen — be flexible and just ensure that every team presents their topic and participants take their commitment seriously to attend and support the group learning.
• Most importantly — pay it forward. If you’ve made it up the ladder — look behind you and see how you can help elevate others and share the learnings.

And that’s the gist of it. With some scheduling, creativity, and a commitment to learn you can run a ring. As a facilitator you’ll get as much out of it as the participants — if not more. It’s one of the most personally rewarding things you can do. To paying it forward…