Mentorship
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The professional mentoring relationship is something I‘m trying to understand better. When I first started working, one source of confusion was what the expectations should be for both the mentor and the mentee. Doing research online helped clarify this for me, somewhat. Below, I share what I learned.
Motivations for Mentoring
- Help raise the bar of the industry by teaching your mentees good ethics and professionalism
- Cement your knowledge by organizing your ideas in preparation to teach someone and explaining process/concepts to someone who will question everything
- Develop your interpersonal and communication skills
- Create more helpful, satisfied colleagues. Someone who has been effectively mentored is more likely to become a successful mentor to others later on.
Expectations for Mentor
The mentor should:
- Advise the mentee on how to become a professional software developer. This spans time management, estimation, ethics, and how to function in a team and organization
- Impart technical knowledge (through code reviews and/or pair programming)
- Ideally, help the mentee build something. This could involve defining requirements, prioritizing, defining a development process, defining a deployment strategy
- Create opportunities to help the mentee grow
A mentee should NOT expect their mentor to change their career. Mentors give advice and it’s up to the mentee to decide what to do with that advice. It is the mentee’s responsibility to shape their own career.
Tips for Mentor
If you’re a mentor, thank you for volunteering to mentor in addition to your responsibilities to help your team ship code and hit their goals! Because a mentoring relationship can have such a profound impact on a mentee, please consider the following:
- Avoid telling your mentee how to do something; prescribing to them isn’t as helpful as offering your experience and asking them to consider their options to find their own answers. Give them room to try their own ideas. If your mentee tries something that doesn’t work out, praise their initiative, then prompt them to learn from the failure and work with them to decide what to do next.
- Give honest feedback.
- Be patient with questions. Your mentee asks you a lot of questions because they respect your ability and judgment. Getting visibly frustrated can make your mentee afraid to seek your advice in the future.
- Offer your mentee challenges. This pushes their notion of what they can accomplish. The pride they feel upon finishing the task will make them motivated to take on more.
- Depending on their personality, a mentee can be vulnerable, hanging on to your words and actions.
Tips for Both Mentor & Mentee
- Establish goals for the mentee. If the mentor knows what the mentee wants to learn and where they want to be months after working together, they will be more effective. Goals should be as concrete as possible, i.e. write an application with features X, Y, Z and have it deployed to production; submit a patch to an open source project; or whatever the pair agrees on.
- Have a quick feedback loop (a 48-hour window is recommended, especially if you work in the same organization).
- Listen
- Have respect for and empathize with the other person.
- Commit. This includes communicating when something isn’t ideal. A successful mentorship hinges on trust, which doesn’t form overnight.
Tips for Mentee
Don’t be intimidated.
If someone inspires you, that’s all the more reason to talk to them! Get their unique perspective on things by asking questions.
Your mentors are busy people with deadlines and other work and life responsibilities. Respect their time.
- Prepare for meetings. Have an agenda in advance of every meeting with a specific objective of what you hope to get out of it. Come to meetings with questions and feedback.
- Be on time. Also, avoid consistently rescheduling meetings when your mentor has set aside that time for you.
- Set concrete deadlines. If you want them to look at or help with something, tell them when you will get them the materials they need.
- Ask questions that are easier to answer. Present options and ask for help on how to think about the options. An example from the Ladies Storm Hackathons community:
“I want to do x, where should I start” = okay, let me Google with you.
“I want to accomplish x and I’ve done my own research. This is what I bring to the table, could you advise me on which direction to take” = amazing! - Understand that the moment you decide you need advice might not be the best time for them.
Aside from their other responsibilities, your mentors are volunteering to mentor you. Make their time and energy a worthwhile investment.
- Use what they teach you to become a better team member and engineer. This includes following through with what you’ve told your mentor you’ll do.
- Let your mentor know if any of their tips were particularly helpful.
- Proactively share with others the knowledge your mentor shares with you.
Be proactive.
- Ask for feedback.
- Figure out what you want help on and then take initiative to ask your mentor for advice.
- Identify challenges to take on and figure out how you want your mentor to support you as you push yourself with these challenges.
Listen and be comfortable with accepting feedback.
Be open-minded.
Explore new ideas and approaches suggested by your mentor, even if they’re beyond your comfort zone.
Demonstrate and measure your progress.
This can done in different ways, such as blogging about what you’re learning, crossing milestones off a checklist, or tracking a metric. Seeing how much progress you’ve made can really encourage your mentor.
Give back.
When you come across blogs, podcasts, tools or opportunities that are relevant to their interests, share them with your mentor!
Recognize that your mentor is one person with limited time and multiple priorities.
Have compassion and understand that your mentor is human and it’s unrealistic to expect them to be able to help with all of your problems. There are many opportunities to find mentorship; consider looking to more than one person for mentorship.
