What it takes to be a Good Mentor
When I was first prompted about mentoring a young engineer at a previous company, impostor syndrome decided to bite. Strangely enough, it’s returned as I’m writing this!
Sure, I’ve had thirty years of experiences, both good and bad, in my journey leading to Accurx, but how can I specifically help awesome people working on things I don’t understand yet?
I’ve found it tremendously rewarding being in environments where personal development is taken seriously, where time is deliberately made to facilitate engineers growing into their role and exploring the directions they want to head into.
My own journey went down several dead ends as I discovered what each option entailed and where my passions really lay, and perhaps would have been smoother having had my own mentor earlier in life?
With four separate mentoring relationships under my belt, and mentees at various stages in their careers, it’s been a priority to make sure that the time is a good investment for all concerned. It must have been good for my mentees or they wouldn’t have come back each time with such enthusiasm! But more than that, it’s made me a better, more understanding engineer, and pushed me to spend time evaluating my past experiences more critically and trying to distil wisdom out of them.
So, what does it take to be a good mentor?
The ability to take vicarious satisfaction
It should be hugely rewarding to watch someone else achieving great things! As a team, we only succeed by succeeding together.
In some cases when I’ve sat down with a mentee for the first time, they have brought a very tangible goal — to achieve a specific promotion, for example. I can’t achieve that for them, of course, so my role is to throw light on the path to that goal, help them define the steps to take, provide useful resources and encouragement, and then let them get on with it.
For others, it’s been much more exploratory. Having reached a Senior Engineer position, a fork in the path emerges — remaining at that level and staying deep in detailed coding concerns, heading towards team leadership and ultimately management where the code has to be left in the hands of others, or towards higher-level engineering where the problems are more concerned with how the components we build combine into a coherent whole rather than the inner workings of any single one. Each path requires a different skill-set — of course these skills can be learnt, none of us is born with them! — but also a different set of motivations. Having experience of all the options means I can try to pose the right questions to my mentees to prompt them to introspect and understand where their heart lies — because that’s almost certainly where the best chance of success lies. And hopefully I can also provide the reassurance that whatever they choose, the choice isn’t permanent. A successful career doesn’t have to be neatly linear!
The ability to think on your feet
No two sessions are the same.
I should really have realised that when I started, of course. I’m not taking on the role of a teacher with a set syllabus of topics to cover. It’s up to my mentee to work out what would be of most value on any given week. That means that one week we can be talking about immediate technical problems, then on to career plans, to reading lists, to chewing over changes within the mentee’s team, to war stories, and I just have to improvise! I’m hopefully clear that I don’t always have simple answers, there’s a lot of “it depends” and interesting discussions as we unpack that cliché, and sometimes the best thing to do is crack open the development environment and dive in to see what we can find. There’s also the occasional confession — as a junior who’s smarting from an embarrassing mistake, the most reassuring thing you can hear is that your respected seniors have done worse things and recovered, whether or not they like to admit it! I find the most helpful conversations are completely unscripted and develop a life of their own, and it’s very common to get to the end of an hour without noticing that time has passed at all.
The ability to retrospect candidly.
I’ll reiterate that I’m not a teacher, and the flow of learning has not been one-way!
I’m now on my eighth — and very hopefully last — company in thirty years and my path to here has been a bit of a zig-zag. Talking through that path with my mentees has not only shown them all the options available to them and helped them crystallise their vision of the future that they want, it’s made me revisit my own motivations and misconceptions. How did my teams, colleagues and the environment around me help me shape what I thought were my own decisions and make me who I am today? What did I puzzle over or worry about that’s now obvious with hindsight? And possibly the most interesting hypothetical, if my 25-year-old self could sit down with me, what would I ask and what would I do differently as a result of what present-me might say? I do find myself reflecting a lot on my past in any case — an ideal use of a quiet hour on the train home — but having mentees eager to hear my stories has pushed me to dig deep for valuable nuggets of wisdom.
The ability to let go
I really enjoy my time with my mentees. Everyone has provided me with challenges, an opportunity to share my experiences, and I enjoy seeing them go from strength to strength. But it’s not about me. My ego has to take second place, and indeed it feels good when they’ve ticked off a major career step, we take the time to retrospect about our relationship and its value, and they decide it’s time to move on and find someone else to walk with them on the next stage of their journey. They’ve outgrown me — that’s my cue to celebrate! And it’s even more rewarding when they reach the point where they swap sides and become a mentor to the next generation.
Just dive in
Four year’s experience of mentoring has been wonderful, and if it appeals to you, the best way to find out if it’s right for you is to just give it a go. Watching someone else grow in their career is fantastically rewarding, and it will stretch you along the way. I’d say now that it’s definitely easier to mentor someone outside your immediate team, but where you’re still reasonably familiar with what they do; a bit of distance from the ups and downs of day-to-day life is helpful in cultivating a safe space where every issue can be explored frankly. Some companies have formal schemes which pair people up, but that’s not necessary — you can start with as little as two people who want to make the relationship work and a basic working agreement. When you have someone eager to learn and someone eager to share, great things will happen!
