The Manager’s Path — Book Summary [Chapter 2]

Continuing the series, here is a quick summary of chapter 2 of Camille Fournier’s book “The Manager’s Path”. This chapter is about Mentoring.

If you have come directly to this, you can have a look at the first article of the series which talks about What to expect from your manager.

Importance of Mentoring to Junior Team Members

Mentors are typically assigned to junior team members, often new hires or student interns, as part of the onboarding process in many organisations. This mentorship benefits both parties: mentors gain experience in guiding others and mentees receive focused support without distractions from other responsibilities.

Being a Mentor

If you find yourself in the mentor’s seat, Congratulations! This is a valuable opportunity to learn about management and responsibility while guiding others. The only cons involve either your mentee draining more of your time than you expected or you delivering a poor mentoring experience that discourages your mentee from joining or causes early departures. Unfortunately, the latter outcome is more common. Weak mentors can waste talented individuals by neglecting, giving trivial tasks, or even intimidating them. Thus, it is important to know the basic framework of how to mentor. Let’s see how that changes depending on the stage your mentee is at.

Mentoring an Intern

Most tech companies have summer interns; smart college students looking to get some valuable industry experience. While the recruitment process might vary from company to company, realistically the candidate will know very little and might apply someplace else if their experience with you is not good. If the intern has a good experience, they will tell their classmates about the internship experience and that will bolster your chances of hiring from that college. Fortunately, impressing interns is not rocket science!

Project Selection is key to ensure that the intern does not feel lost/bored. Pick something low pressure (to not rush them into things), well defined (so that you can solve their doubts, and brainstorm ideas), and should have production impact (so that they can learn SDLC practices and can see their change in use). You can also pick some blue sky ideas that your team has wanted to try out but not getting the time to do so.

Initial days for them involve office integration, meeting people and learning the systems. Meet with them as much as possible in the first few days: help in setting up IDE, familiarising code, touching bases multiple times a day. Break the project into multiple milestones. Walk through the breakdown with the intern. Including the presentation of the project to the team as a milestone is a good way of setting the expectation that you want them to deliver the project. Some key skills of a manager that you get to learn as a mentor are:

Listening Carefully

Listening is the first and most basic skill in managing people. When your mentee is speaking to you, pay attention to your own behavior. Concentrate on what they are saying otherwise you are not listening well.
Also, people are not good at expressing things precisely how the other person understands. So listening goes beyond hearing: interpreting their body language and the way they’re saying those words. These will give you clues as to whether they feel understood or not.
Be prepared to repeat complex information. Invite clarification and rephrase what you have said. Let them correct you. Recognise that you are in a position of power in your mentee’s eyes. They could be nervous about screwing this opportunity up, trying their best to please you / not look stupid, and thus may not ask questions even when they don’t understand things. Again, follow the same advice and invite clarifications.

Communicating what needs to happen

Should the intern excessively rely on your assistance and neglect independent problem-solving, use this as an opportunity to develop this key managerial skill: communicating what needs to happen.
Clearly express the expectation for doing research on their own before seeking help. Encourage self-reliance by assigning tasks like explaining code or processes and directing them to relevant resources. If challenges persist, assign the next milestone and ask them to solve it alone for a couple of days. Breaking down the project beforehand helps you here. The intern may even surprise you by doing things faster!

Adjusting to their responses

Many things can happen in the course of the mentoring relationship: they can far outstrip your expectations; they can struggle with simple tasks; produce quick but low-quality work or strive for perfection at the cost of speed. In the initial days, you should learn and adjust the frequency with which you two meet to smoothen the curve of the overall output.

Hopefully, the internship ends on good terms. They completed a project of value and you got to work on your skills. Now, let’s look at the other type of mentorship.

Mentoring a New Hire

Mentoring new hires is critical. Your job as a new hire mentor consists of onboarding, helping the person adjust to life in the company and building your and her network of contacts in the company. It can be an easier job than mentoring an intern, but the relationship and mentoring will usually go on for a lot longer.

This is a good opportunity for you to look at the company from an outside perspective: the jargon, culture, and process that have become second nature for you might be completely alien to the new joiner. Navigating them again and de-mystifying them for the new joiner might enable you to perform better than usual as well.
Teams commonly have onboarding documents to help ramp up new joiners. Mentoring the new joiner by navigating them through these documents and having her modify where needed also sends the message that they have the power and obligation to learn and share what they have learnt for the benefit of the entire team.
Part of the mentoring opportunity here is the chance to introduce the new person around. Bringing the new joinee into some of your networks will help them ramp up faster and will give you entry into their networks. The workplace is built around humans and their interactions, and networking forms the basis of any career.

When you are a mentor

Key tenets of being a mentor

• Be explicit about your time commitment: how frequently you can meet, what day/timeslot works for you
• Open Communication: Establish an environment of open and honest communication where your mentee feels comfortable sharing thoughts
• Feedback: Engage in attentive and empathetic listening and provide constructive and actionable feedback to help your mentee improve their skills and performance
• Setting Goals: Collaboratively set clear, achievable goals that align with your mentee’s aspirations and track progress toward them
• Long-Term Impact: Strive to make a lasting positive impact on your mentee’s personal and professional development

When you are a mentee

Key tenets of being a mentee:

• Openness: Be open to receiving guidance, feedback, and advice from your mentor.
• Active Listening: Listen attentively to your mentor’s insights and experiences, and ask thoughtful questions.
• Initiative: Take initiative in seeking learning opportunities and taking actions to achieve your goals.
• Goal Setting: Collaborate with your mentor to set clear, achievable goals and develop a plan to reach them
• Time Management: Value your mentor’s time by being punctual, organised, and prepared for mentoring sessions.

Tips for the Manager of a Mentor

What you measure, you improve. As a manager, you help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals. Figure out what you’re hoping to achieve by creating the relationship. Then, find the person who can help meet those goals.

When we assign a mentor for your new hire or intern, the goal is well defined: helping a new person on the team get up to speed and be productive. Thus, finding mentors, in this case, is relatively straightforward as the goal is clear.

For long-term mentorship for the development of people, it only succeeds if both mentor and mentee put dedicated effort into it. Use the above guidance framework and try to align the mentor and mentee towards a goal that you want to achieve out of that pairing.

As a manager, another key role that you play in smoothening the mentorship process is recognising the effort of the mentor and allocating the required time. Investing in mentoring also yields benefits like improved networks and faster onboarding. You can also utilise it to cultivate future leaders, enhancing their interpersonal skills and perspective. Engage diverse individuals, fostering empathy, and expanding networks while facilitating mentor-mentee interactions.

With this, we conclude the second chapter of this series. Will be summarising the following chapters of the book over the next few weeks.