How BlaBlaCar implemented a mentorship program for aspiring managers
How BlaBlaCar implemented a mentorship program to help individual contributors transition to a management career track.
Why the Mentorship program
At BlaBlaCar, engineers can choose between 2 career tracks: individual contributor or manager. Switching from IC to manager can be a big leap though. That’s why we created the Mentorship program to help them prepare for a change to a management career track.
It was also an opportunity for managers to experiment with management delegation and for mentees to get more support and coaching.
How it works
At BlaBlaCar, Mentor is a role assigned by a manager to one of their reports to be responsible for the operational management of one or more teammates. While the manager remains the official supervisor, the mentor runs one on one meetings, provides guidance, assistance, and feedback as needed.
From day one, the program has been built with a tripartite approach:
- For mentors, it’s an opportunity to learn the ropes of management in a safe and operational environment with the help of an experienced manager
- For managers, it’s an opportunity to focus their time by using delegation
- For mentees, it’s an opportunity to benefit from more management support
Obviously, all 3 parties need to be volunteers to onboard the program, including mentees.
Since mentor is a delegated role, we first started by listing the main people management responsibilities of a manager: from defining individual objectives to validating expense reports. Since delegation is not binary, we used the 7 Levels of Delegation framework to clarify how much of these responsibilities would be delegated to mentors.
To show the different levels of delegation for typical people management responsibility / task, here is an excerpt of the delegation matrix we iteratively built after several workshops:
For example, when confirming a mentee’s probation period, a manager would ask inputs from the mentor before making a decision (level Consult) but a mentor would be fully responsible for validating their mentees’s vacation request or expense reports (level Delegate).
As they remain the official supervisor, managers keep a monthly “skip-level” meeting with the mentees.
Coaching and training
When assigning a mentor role, managers define objectives and key results to their mentors for the period of the mentoring (usually 6 months, renewable if accepted by all parties). In order to reach these OKRs, mentors benefit from training and coaching from their own managers. For example, we organize share & learn group sessions about how to run one on one meetings and how to assess performance before end of year reviews. These sessions are an opportunity for managers to teach some management techniques and for mentors to share their experience with other mentors.
In addition, each manager spends some one on one time with their mentors, following their progress and helping them on various management situations that the mentors might face with their mentees.
Results and feedback
A first experiment was conducted for a full semester with several mentors and mentees. With an overall NPS of 40, the experiment was a success and the program was extended to other departments.
Mentors enjoyed the opportunity to learn people management with training and support from their manager.
“Being a mentor helped me understand and learn the human aspect of management and how to properly support engineers for their day-to-day work. Thanks to my manager, I learned a lot and it confirmed my interest in becoming a full time manager.”
– A mentor from the program
Mentees benefited from the proximity with their mentor and their support on a daily basis.
“My mentor not only helped accelerate my onboarding in a remote environment but also shared their experience to improve my soft and technical skills on a day-to-day basis.”
– A mentee from the program
Finally, managers confirmed several benefits, including focus improvements and a great opportunity to share their knowledge and experience with aspiring managers.
One year after the start of the program, 2 mentors have been promoted to a management position while some others have decided to remain individual contributors with other technical leadership roles. In addition, 2 mentees have been promoted to confirmed positions.
