Title: How to Find a Mentor + Why it’s Important: Part three

This is part three in an ongoing series; read part one here, and part two here.

If you’ve recently taken over a team or are in a new role, there are bound to be times of uncertainty or you may be unfamiliar with a task.What some managers tend to is make themselves feel successful by having their team complete a ton of tasks at the expense of other priorities. While this approach may seem effective as you’re getting lots of tasks completed, it’s easy to burn out the team, and at times, make them lose focus on the key objectives.

How can you solve for the above?

The answer is to prioritize, prioritize, and prioritize.

How do you prioritize?

By collaborating with your team and coming up with goals for the month or quarter, you allow yourself to focus and stay disciplined on what matters. It also gives you an easy way to say “no” to things not on the list. In many ways, the team’s goals are the team’s priorities, and it’s crucial to proactively monitor them every week or day to understand how you’re tracking against them.

Now, how do you ensure the team’s goals are being tracked properly? A very simple process is to hold a daily standup meeting. Here at Plato, we break out into different teams and hold a 10–15 minute meeting every morning, and each person shares their top three priorities for the day.

A few suggestions if you’re going to use this process from our learnings at Plato:

• Document everything
• Track rigorously
• Provide visibility on the progress that’s being made
• Celebrate and recognize achievements of the team

At Plato, we built a dashboard internally but you can certainly use another preferred solution to complete this. (Other tools can be Trello, Airtable, Asana, Notion, Koan, Lattice, etc)

Document, Track, and celebrate.

The purpose of the dashboard is to help each individual document their goals and priorities for the quarter. We suggest keeping to a maximum of three to ensure the most crucial items get completed. On top of our quarterly goals, we have weekly goals that help guide each person toward their quarterly goals.

We’ve found that having a centralized location provides visibility and becomes a great way to celebrate as a team when a milestone is met. You need to ensure you have a process to capture and track each person’s quarterly goals, as well as their weekly priorities they are working on to push closer towards achieving their milestones.

The second item we suggest is having a daily stand up call or meeting with one day acting as the day where you can articulate not only the day’s goals but also the goals for the week. For our team at Plato, we meet as a team on Monday mornings whereas other teams selected another day. Most employees at Plato work out of the San Francisco office so we meet as a team each morning to share what we worked on yesterday, share the top items we are working on for the day, as well as over communicate if there are any obstacles to blockers we can remove. The goal of these quick meetings is to provide visibility to the rest of the group and show progress towards helping the team become more self-sufficient.

On the chance you have a remote team, and want to make them successful, Sue at Zoosk shares her learnings in this Plato story.

Per Sue’s suggestions, it’s important to be intentional about the time of day, and the style in how you decide to hold these weekly and daily stand-ups. What we have found works well at Plato is doing them at the earliest possible hour of the day, which is at 8:30 for our teams, but this will mainly depend on your team’s working style. People will have different perspectives here, but the logic of having it as early as possible is if you’re trying to prioritize for the day and part of the objective is to be transparent as well as be able to see the progress each team member is making, it would make the most sense to articulate and share the priorities for the day first thing.

It’s also important to make adjustments and improvements to this process as you continue, however, remind people who are consistently behind implementing this process, and the positive impact it has in helping people move closer to their individual goals.

To read the rest of the handbook and get other actionable insights, you can download our handbook here.

Plato is on a mission to help engineering + product leaders develop soft skills and build better teams. Plato does this through a powerful mentoring platform, where new leaders connect with seasoned professionals for 1–1 sessions, AMAs, and a comprehensive knowledge base.

Plato Mentors have extensive experience in management, and come from top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Netflix, and Spotify — among others.

Founded in 2017 by two French entrepreneurs, Quang Hoang, and Jean-Baptiste Coger who met while attending the prestigious ISAE-Supaero school of engineering, Plato is one of the fastest growing engineering + product mentoring platforms in the world.