Mentoring: 12 tips from the team’s experiences
We love mentoring, at Accurx! That’s why we’re currently piloting our mentoring programme, so that people across the company can benefit from the experiences and insights of others in navigating their roles and Accurx life.
I know first-hand just how valuable mentoring can be. In my previous role, I was lucky enough to have an amazing mentor Sébastien Axinté, who supported me with everything from my technical growth to how to manage a project and lead a team. Sébastien once said: “my goal is to impact your growth as much as my last mentor did for me.” Two years on, it’s safe to say that he achieved this goal given he completely shaped my career as an engineer. So it’s now my turn to achieve that goal for someone else!
“What is being a mentor?”
Today, I mentor some of the Frontend Engineers at Accurx and often wonder how I can improve my mentoring and learn from other mentorships. So I decided to start a discussion session about mentoring, “What is being a mentor?”, at our recent Summer Conference.
The session was formed of about 20 people from all sides of the business, including managers, developers, operations and apprentices. We shared our wins, our failures and the personal experiences that have helped us grow as mentors and mentees. At the end of the discussion, we came out with 12 main tips to make mentoring a success. Here they are!
Top tips for mentors:
1. Ask what kind of mentor your mentee is looking for.
Everyone wants something different from their mentor. It’s up to you to either adapt or, if you don’t meet these needs, let them know that you can’t provide that type of mentorship. Work out what their expectations are and the best way to fulfil these, whether this means meeting face-to-face each week, providing written guidance or simply offering some light feedback or advice.
2. Don’t force yourself to be a mentor.
Not everyone is good at mentoring or wants to mentor. That’s ok. But forcing someone to become a mentor is never a good idea. The mentor will do their job badly while the mentee will be left alone feeling lost and probably a little frustrated.
3. Mentoring should be personalised.
Each mentor-mentee pair is unique. As much as every individual is unique, you can’t just treat two different mentees the same way. Draw on your training and dedicate 1–1 time.
“Earlier in my career, when I was a mentee, I was put into a group mentorship programme. There were two mentees and one mentor and the experience wasn’t valuable for me because what we needed from our mentor was completely different. Our job roles were different and our personality types were different, which meant that the mentorship experience felt very disjointed.
Rather than having one smooth session, it felt like the 45–60 min we had was just cut into two, where the mentor focused on one mentee at a time. This made me question what the value of the session was and sometimes felt like time that wasn’t spent the best way.” User Researcher, Accurx
4. Create a relationship.
Yes, relationship! You need to understand your mentee to be able to help them. Once they trust you, they will be more likely to open up about their difficulties and failures. Naturally, this can take time. You can’t force someone to open up to you, so don’t push for it but let it happen. As a mentor, being vulnerable and sharing some personal experiences may help them to open up. Also knowing their strengths and weaknesses in detail will give you some tools to help them.
5. Build trust for difficult conversations
You can grow your mentee’s confidence by being a vocal advocate for them and reflecting their best skills and traits back at them. On the flip side, difficult conversations will help them to grow. That means a healthy balance of the two is important to their development. This all hinges on the trusting relationship you’ve built with your mentee. Your constructive feedback will be really more impactful if your mentee trusts you. You want to create a space for you both to talk about anything — even if that means a hard discussion.
6. Give detailed feedback with examples.
As a mentor, you will have opportunities to observe your mentee — going to the same meetings, doing some code pairing or working on the same project for example. Use these settings to make note of feedback. This can be a sample of code, specific meeting interaction, some documents, notes, comments, specific initiatives, ideas or actions. Discuss these when you get a chance. Having some concrete examples when talking through feedback can help them understand and get as much from it as possible.
7. Mentoring is a two-way thing.
Learning is not only for the mentee. By sharing your knowledge and explaining things, you will strengthen your skills. Push your mentee to ask lots of questions. That way, you’ll need to do some research if you don’t know the answers. It’s also important to ask for feedback regularly. Understanding what you did wrong and right, and about your impact will help build that trust and improve the mentorship. Here are some examples of prompts for your mentee:
- “Is my feedback detailed enough?”
- “Do you get enough guidance?”
- “Would you like to change anything in the mentorship?”
- ”For our next meeting, try to think if you would like anything different from that mentorship that you’re currently missing.”
8. The outside world does exist.
Don’t just talk about their current job. Talk about their future, regardless of whether they’re in their current role or somewhere completely different. Mentorship is about a person growing, above and beyond the here and now.
Top tips for mentees:
9. Choose your mentor.
To find your ideal mentor, it’s worth making a company mentoring board. You can use the board to include helpful information such as the areas of expertise and mentoring style you’re looking for, as well as what the mentor’s requirements are in a mentee, how much capacity they have and the necessary time commitment. This can help the mentee to choose someone they feel comfortable with to help the pair to bond.
10. Find a mentor outside your direct line of management.
While not always the case, doing this can often lead to a more open mentorship. Some of us can be nervous to show weakness to our manager/mentor if we’re hoping for a promotion. It’s easier to create that safe space with someone independent.
11. Structure the catch-up.
If you don’t structure your catch-ups, it’s very easy to miss important points and to lose your train of thought. Someone should take ownership of the catch up. Working on the structure could empower you to take control of your mentorship and also give you space to reflect before a catch up. Your mentor can also help you work on this structure. Creating a schedule or some bullet points and sharing these with them can help both of you to prepare, reflect and be mentally ready to approach your discussions.
Also remember not to overdo it. Focus on one thing at a time with one mentor. If you want to learn several specific things from different mentors, do it one by one. You will have more focus and get results faster!
12. Don’t be afraid to break up.
If that doesn’t work with your mentor or mentee let them know. Like in any relationship, no matter how amazing someone is, sometimes it just doesn’t work. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can also start the mentorship on a trial basis for a few months and if it doesn’t work, be open and move on.
Let me know YOUR mentoring tips!
I hope this post will help some of you. I’d love to hear about your mentoring experiences, any thoughts on the above and any tips of your own. If you have any, please do leave a comment — let’s just help each other out!
Also, if you want to learn more about Accurx or are looking for an exciting new role, check out our careers page!
