Mentoring: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Let’s imagine that you’re quite successful in your field. Work there for years and years. Have a vast amount of knowledge and quite frankly don’t know what to do next.
The answer is simple. Give back. Start to bring knowledge that you have to the people who need it.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. By William Arthur Ward
Why?
- Widen your skills with a new soft skill. This will lay a brick towards becoming a generalist, which is also known as a T-Shaped person.
- Giving back will feel great once there are first few results. Even simple thank you from a mentee can make the day.
- It’s amazing to see things come true before your eyes and understand your influence on them
- By teaching others, you will re-formulate concepts for yourself, learn how to explain better and inevitably will improve own understanding
Mindset
State of mind for a mentor is different than for a learner. See yourself as a doctor, psychologist sitting in a comfy cabinet. There is a person who needs your attention and help. It can even take a shape of a compassion.
You’re here to help. Without you, he or she will not get over this. This is mission critical.
No Whip
There is a school of an army boot camp style. Everyone is the same. A mentor is a god. Any failure is punished. Fear and discipline are the main muses.
This is great in specific environments but fails miserably in creative ones. It’s important to understand that all people are different and, therefore, require an individual approach.
Not everyone can manage their learning quite well as others. One will do everything on time, other will have additional circumstances like having a completely different fear level of the subject while still wanting to learn it.
Want Level
Begin mentors often think that it’s enough for a mentee to just want to learn this topic. Afterwards, everything will come in its place. This is a sign that mentor was not curious about his mentee and just being lazy.
Accountable
Keeping mentee’s accountable pushes you to create an initial plan on how you’re going to attack this activity. Don’t start it if you don’t have a plan and don’t see what the goal is. It will heavily demotivate a person being mentored and keep you walking (and most likely stumbling) in the dark.
A Plan will help everyone to be accountable. A mentee can see his progress and understand how he is doing, which is essential for any learning activity.
Support Network
Getting a few people around learner helps him to get more perspective and bring different angle views to the table. This is what could be created quite naturally by mentee himself. Alternatively, this could be planned by a mentor which is very situational but gives good results over time.
It depends on the stage of the learning process. At the beginning, you don’t need many people around they will just confuse you. Once there are first signs of grasping new material and there is time to dive into practice — this is where more opinion will create a rich and saturated understanding.
Once mentee is up and going almost by himself you can throw in more and more people in the support network.
Having support network for learning also helps when people go on vacation or overly busy with upcoming releases. It creates more space and fallback for a mentee to get help if it’s necessary.
In Railsware support network is exclusively internal for a long period of time and every learning program is catered towards individual needs.
Mutual mentorship
A mentee is there to learn from you. However, don’t miss an opportunity to learn from them as well. It doesn’t matter how old they are or how junior they might be — there is aways a room to learn for new things.
If you’re a front-end engineer teaching designer how to code — consider getting simple knowledge on how to do basic design. Even on a small scale. It could be very well integrated into the learning process where the designer does practical exercises and you learn design from this. The most important piece is to understand if you need it and to ask. What’s asked gets answered.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this — please ♥ or share. This will tell me to write more of it. Have a good day.
=S
