Mentorship as Community-Building

A conversation with EDGE in Tech director Jill Finlayson

Published in

BerkeleyISchool

7 min readAug 30, 2021

Whether you’re a budding tech professional or a career changer seeking to enter the field, the guidance of a trusted mentor can help sharpen your goals and open doors to new insights and opportunities. But even for experienced leaders, mentoring can be a powerful tool to expand community, hone empathy — and foster diversity in the process.

“Mentoring is not a transactional relationship.”

As a fellow with Career Services at the UC Berkeley School of Information, I spoke with Jill Finlayson, Director of the UC EDGE in Tech Initiative, about how mentoring can propel innovation and enhance professional growth at any stage, for senior execs and new hires alike. “Mentoring is not a transactional relationship,” she says. “It’s more of a trusted relationship, an exploration.” For Finlayson, whose own career has been shaped by mentorship in Silicon Valley and around the globe, open-mindedness and a problem-solving approach are the key components of successful mentor-to-mentee exchanges.

Julia Nelsen: You’ve been involved with mentoring for a long time. Why are you so passionate about it?

Jill Finlayson: I love working with startup founders, who are generally positive, constructive, high-energy people. What appeals to me about mentoring is that you get to help expedite. Sharing information, streamlining, and creating connections reduces the amount of duplicative work. It cuts through the noise; it gets people more quickly to where they’re going. You get an opportunity to meet folks at an interesting point in their life, think about what they want to achieve, and reflect on their experiences. Mentoring is holding up a mirror to them so they can see their strengths. It’s also translating what their skills mean to an employer. Mentoring is the small nudge that helps tip people into the success they’re headed for anyway. There’s huge satisfaction in helping someone remove a barrier and get past something that’s been holding them back. You have shared success when they go forward.

JN: What do you think is distinctive about mentoring in tech, specifically?

JF: A few things come to the fore. First, technology is changing so quickly, that having a mentor allows you to see where you need to build your skills to keep pace. It’s about discovery. It gives you a window into different possibilities and helps to connect you with the right people. In tech, mentoring is also important because of the imbalance, the bias. Since women and people of color are so underrepresented, they don’t have the role models and sense of comfort that folks in the dominant population have. Mentoring helps to cushion that. It helps to get actionable tips on how to thrive, coping strategies, success strategies that will allow you to get into the networks you need, to make sure your voice is heard. It’s comforting to have a sounding board to help you push forward when you’re feeling imposter syndrome, especially if the mentor has had a similar experience.

JN: Is it fair to say that mentoring can also be a form of advocacy for underrepresented groups in tech? How can gender and identity-based mentoring relationships create impact?

JF: Mentoring is specifically valuable for under-included communities, due to things like “likes attract” and “separate spheres,” which can make it hard to access “in” groups. In an ideal mentor match, there are shared values that can be any number of different things: we both spent time in a certain country, our parents didn’t go to college, we grew up speaking the same language. Shared experience gives an added level of depth to the relationship. But you can build shared values, too. There is great value in meeting people who have different experiences than your own — for example, reverse mentoring, where younger employees connect with more senior employees who learn different perspectives from a digital native. With mentoring, you learn so much from being open-minded and assuming positive intent.

With mentoring, you learn so much from being open-minded and assuming positive intent.

Mentors can also help share their power and privilege to open doors for those who don’t have as much access. In fact, the data show that having a white male sponsor — versus a peer or a woman or person of color — leads to a higher salary and greater advancement. Mentorship can help level the playing field so that eventually there won’t be as much imbalance. To better connect with people, it’s really important for mentors to think about diversifying — their networks, their examples, their connections — because that’s where they can be role models. Mentors have to be self-aware and really do the work to make sure they’re focusing on inclusion.

JN: What challenges do you see with mentoring in tech?

JF: Mentorship programs have been effective, but not necessarily equitably effective. Part of what can make mentorship unapproachable is when people don’t know what career they want, who they want to talk to, what questions to ask. If you’ve never been exposed to mentoring and you’re being asked to allocate the precious time spent studying and working to pay for your education, you need to understand why it’s important. There’s a fundamental piece in mentorship around elucidating why networking matters, what is the value of social capital, how it can open doors. One of the things we’re researching with EDGE in Tech is how to make mentoring work more equitably for everyone. We need to give mentors the frameworks to aid in that exploration process for people from a range of different backgrounds.

A second issue with mentorship can be the hierarchy, the power dynamic. It’s so important for mentors to show their failures! People’s stellar resumes are the edited version of their lives and can amplify the distance between mentee and mentor. Pointing out failures and setbacks is not only reassuring and less intimidating, but it also demonstrates resilience — like that old saying, “I’ve failed more times than you’ve tried.” There’s real importance in showing humility to make the relationship more successful.

JN: How do you see mentorship evolving along with current transformations in the world of work, especially as a result of the pandemic?

JF: I think that virtual and hybrid environments can fuel opportunities for fruitful mentoring relationships. Since mentors tend to be quite busy, being able to hop on a call and quickly go ‘back to work,’ as it were, is very efficient. Going forward, I think programs will continue to do mentorship remotely with in-person meetings once a month, or once per quarter.

More broadly, this is a pivotal moment, and leaders will have to be more intentional about countering long-held assumptions and biases in the workplace, which have disproportionately benefited a certain type of extroverted and dominant person. Leaders need mentoring to avoid falling into these traps, to foster better communication skills: empathy, listening, problem-solving, collaboration, psychological security. If you’re mentoring, you’re also building these core competencies and learning how to see things from different perspectives. Because technology is so impactful on society, leaders need to hone these skills so that they are considering ethics and unintended consequences, who is helped, and who is harmed. For both sides, mentoring helps to expand and diversify your network, which in the end is going to help technology be more effective for all.

Interested in mentoring? Here are some of Jill’s tips to get started and make the most of it.

Join a program. First-time mentees can benefit from structured programs like the ones organized by CodePath, Out in Tech, or Women in Cybersecurity. Many professional associations like the Global Semiconductor Alliance also have mentorship baked into their events and initiatives.
Connect. If you’re searching for a mentor outside of a formal program, find people who are doing work you’d like to be doing and “engineer serendipity” that will lead to connections: attend a panel, read their articles, ask questions on LinkedIn. When reaching out to a prospective mentor, show them you’ve done your homework. Rather than offer to “buy them coffee,” request 15 minutes to learn from them about a specific topic or area of interest. If the conversation goes well, follow up and make the ask. While it may take several tries, there’s no downside to expanding your network and learning different approaches.
Explore and Inquire. One of the best questions a mentee can ask is: “What problem are you facing today? How did you solve X problem?” Besides asking the mentor about a particular challenge, you can learn their process, understand how they break down a problem and solve it, and get some practical tips along the way. Mentors can also ask better questions to help mentees identify and map their skills: “What did you do? How did that work? What were the components of that? What did that mean?” In this way, mentoring enables both parties to “hack” a career challenge together.