Building the future with mentorship
At ManoMano, mentoring plays a big role in building a company where people can strive and find their place.
In this article I will share my vision of mentoring and some of the techniques I use daily to try to be a better mentor. It could help you whether you are starting to mentor people, you are already experienced and want to challenge yourself or even if you are a mentee and want to understand what’s going on on the other side of the fence.
All those things are coming from what I learned, by trial and error and talking with others over several years. I have been, in no specific order, a mentor to more than a dozen people, a teacher, a manager, a lead tech, a trainer and many more things for quite a few companies. That allowed me to see a lot of different perspectives on the matter.
As I am a developer, most of the exemples will use that context but can probably be extrapolated to any field.
What is mentoring?
Let’s check what Wikipedia has to say about that subject:
Mentorship is the influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee.
That’s pretty broad, but pretty spot on. As a mentor you are here to guide your mentee and make them better at doing their job. That is a very important part of learning a new job and pretty close to what was done historically with apprenticeship under a master crafter.
If done correctly, it is really effective in teaching people a craft. Unfortunately, most of the time, we tend to rely more on schools and previous experiences having already taught everything the new hires need to know.
Mentoring is very different from traditional school teaching or formal training in the sense that the main objective is to help people become better at what they do overall. Not necessarily knowing more about a specific subject or being able to navigate all your company processes seamlessly. No, simply be more efficient at what they do daily.
That wide scope is what makes mentoring hard but also exciting and amazing.
Why is mentoring so important?
As I said a bit earlier, mentoring’s goal is to make people better at what they do.
As a person, helping others achieve that is incredibly exciting. Helping someone reach their full potential or even exceed what you thought they could accomplish is an amazing feeling.
As a company, or as a manager, helping people grow is very important. If you don’t do that, they’ll start being bored, complacent and less and less motivated by what they do. So helping them become better is a good way to keep them motivated and, in an unbalanced market like the IT industry, lower your turnover rate.
Also having to show people how you do things and how you think about problems can be quite enlightening. And it is a great way to create the next generation of leaders, managers, mentors that your company will need as it grows.
So as you can see, there are quite a lot of benefits.
Why is mentoring so hard?
Mentoring can be difficult because it requires a lot of commitment and time from the mentors.
Usually, as a junior developer, you’ll get to have the beginning of an explanation from someone between two meetings or have to figure things out with an outdated list of blog links and documents to read
Unfortunately that doesn’t work very well. Mentoring someone requires time and dedication on the mentor’s side but also relies a lot on psychology.
Being a mentor is not related to being a good developer nor being a good manager, even if both those things help. It is a mix of being good at your job and being a teacher with a lot of psychology thrown in the mix. This is not always easy to balance.
The good news is that you don’t need to be perfect to still be a pretty good mentor. But it is unlikely to become one without asking yourself some questions and planning for it.
How to be a better mentor?
Before going deeper into that subject, it’s important to remember that teaching others can be intimidating. Whatever the context or the subject. So it is natural if you feel that way and have some doubts, don’t worry too much about it.
And as I said before, mentoring is not about teaching someone a specific topic or skill but to become better at their job.
So that can make it even harder because everyone is different. And that’s the first advice:
Adapt to your mentee
People are all different: some learn with schemas, some by doing, some by reading complex technical documentation, etc.
So whenever you need to teach someone something you’ll first need to find the right way to do that.
And remember that the “right way” can change for the same person depending on the subject, their current mindset or hundreds of other factors so stay open minded even about that even with someone you know well.
If your current way of explaining is not working, you need to detect it before frustration starts to settle on either side and try a new approach.
Is your mentee lost even after you coded the whole thing in front of them? Maybe try a schema, decompose the problem or create a set of exercises so they can reach the same conclusion by themselves. Or maybe take a break, people can’t think straight when they are tired.
As you can see, you’ll need to be quite prepared. Which brings us to the second advice:
Book some time and be available
Mentoring someone takes a lot of time.
And most of the time, being a mentor is something that the management throws at you while still expecting you to do your job like before. As you can guess, that doesn’t work very well.
To make things harder, you cannot really predict when your mentee will need you. So more than booking time slots in your already overcrowded schedule, it is more about being available.
Being there and open whenever a question needs to be answered is very important to let people speak openly. If every time your mentee has a question you are busy, they’ll start to ask them less and less. And that is what you want to avoid as much as possible.
Of course you can’t be available all the time. So if you cannot answer, still try to find a way to challenge them to try another approach until you can take a look with them. And check back on them as soon as possible.
Most people I know tend to be pretty shy when joining a new company, whatever their age or skill set. So making sure they feel comfortable to ask questions without any complex is very important.
And that’s why the third advice is:
Be proactive
Don’t expect people to come forward by themselves. Between shyness, impostor syndrome, fear of judgment, and a lot of other things you can be sure that most of the questions that should be asked are not.
And you cannot coerce people into asking more questions by force. That will shut them down even more most of the time.
What I try to do is ask regularly how things are going. If you start to do that, explain carefully to your mentee that this is not to oversee them or a trust issue. This is to open the door to questions if they were too shy to ask. Over time it will be less and less useful as the person feels more comfortable asking things but I still keep doing it. As much to show my availability to help them as to trigger a repressed question.
One way to help mitigate that natural shyness that is following the next advice:
Expose your weaknesses
Being a mentor is a challenging role because it creates a distance between you and your mentee. You are the “knowledgeable person”. But that doesn’t mean you need to know everything. Your role is not as much to teach a specific topic as it is to show the way.
Therefore one thing I try to often do is to explain why I know what I am explaining. My knowledge is often the result of past mistakes or previous trials of suboptimal solutions. It’s important to keep in mind that one of the goals of mentoring is to speed up the process of learning by using your own experience. And for that you need to show where this experience is coming from.
It is very tempting to pose as a superhero who has all the answers to protect ourselves from our own self doubts. I’ve done that too. But in the long run it is counterproductive.
What you need to be very careful of are arguments from authority. You should never ever use them.
Sometimes you won’t know you are right. It’s perfectly fine to not always know why our instinct is telling us something. In those cases, look into it with your mentee. You’ll probably learn something and it will help close the gap by showing that you also have some blindspots and how you work on them. Who knows, you might even be wrong, and that’s fine too as long as you admit it and show it’s okay to make mistakes.
In some cases you’ll need to have something done in an emergency and won’t have time to explain why it needs to be done that way. In those cases, come back to that issue as soon as possible and explain or look into it afterward. Never let the person you are mentoring think they should not challenge your solutions or ideas.
That’s a part I struggle a lot with because, like a lot of people, I like to be right and don’t like to have to explain myself. But I might be wrong even when I think I am right. And feeding ready to use ideas and techniques to people doesn’t work in the long run.
Remember the proverb: “give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, teach them to fish and they’ll eat for the rest of their lives”. We want to teach people to think by themselves and find solutions on their own.
All that brings me to my last, and probably hardest, advice:
Know you biases
We all have our biases, habits and personality. I tend to be a control freak who likes perfectionism… Not a good combo for a mentor, so I have to work on it and force myself to let people fail by themselves, to accept that results are often not as good as I would like and let people fix their messes themselves even if that sometimes drives me crazy.
For that, you need to understand your behavior and how it can impact your relationship with your mentee. And following the previous advice, be honest about it. Nobody asks you to be perfect as long as you try your best and you are aware and open about your shortcomings.
How does that work on a daily basis?
The way I manage all that day to day, is by learning to be very good at switching context and accepting that my own work will be slower because of the interruptions.
I try to ask people how things are going whenever I’m switching tasks, just in case I can help someone before starting something else.
What works particularly well is working in binomes or as a group on a single subject. We try to do a lot of pair and mob programming. We switch the keyboard every 15 minutes and everybody needs to understand what’s going on so it requires everyone to explain their train of thoughts. You can learn a lot from that.
In addition to all that, if needed, I also book some slots in my agenda so the people I mentor know that they’ll have 1 hour of my full attention at fixed intervals to deep dive on some subjects.
Finally, I talk about that a lot with my manager and my mentees as it is important to have feedback and good communication. You don’t want to get trapped in your own head doubting everything you do, but you still need to challenge yourself to see if you are not expecting too much or not mentoring the right way.
In conclusion
I hope this article helped you think over your role as a mentor, whether it is something new for you or not. The most important thing is to remember that mentoring is two human beings interacting a lot together, so that can be quite complex and will most likely not work by itself without any effort. But also nobody should expect you to be perfect and get things right the first time.
Focus on communication, make sure you are available and open, be mindful of your own biases and things should be fine.
