Thoughts on Mentorship (Part III)
Welcome back! Here we are for our third and final post focused on mentorship. If you remember, I started out by sharing my opinion that we have a real need for normalizing mentoring in the IT field. Then last week we talked about ways that you as a potential mentee can try to establish a mentoring relationship. This week, I want to wrap up by spending a little bit of time talking to all the senior and principal level people out there as well as people in managerial leadership roles about how you can engage with a potential mentee.
Pictured: an approachable senior engineer.
Well, you’re probably not this scary. But don’t underestimate how intimidating you can be to people more green than yourself.
Let’s get the uncomfortable part out of the way first, shall we? You can be scary. You may feel like you are the most approachable person in the world, but because you’re in a senior role and have a position of authority – that can make people nervous. To be clear, you may actually be the most approachable person in the world, but people who look up to you may still be intimidated by your expertise and position. I’ve had the great fortune to know tons of people who are experts and thought leaders in their field who frequently speak publicly about their craft. Without question, these people are almost always the friendliest, most outgoing people I know. But I’ve seen people so nervous to ask a question that they can’t bring themselves to raise their hands – even when they’re being begged to do so. So yeah, we should be aware that experience and expertise can be intimidating to many.
So why does that matter? Well, while I asserted last week that the burden to establish a mentoring relationship falls primarily on the mentee, I do think that potential mentors have the responsibility to make sure people know that they are available and open to a mentoring relationship. This can be difficult because you want to signal that you are open to having that kind of a relationship, but you also don’t want to seem like the overenthusiastic weirdo who has “Need a mentor? Call me!” on your card. As such, I thought it might be helpful to go through a few possible ways something like this could play out.
First, it helps if you’re a member of one or more professional organizations, and I hope that you are. I can’t say enough about how these groups have helped me in my career, and they certainly present you an excellent opportunity to connect with people at all stages of theirs. If you are in one of these organizations, then it may be as simple as just saying “if you’d like to talk more about this, give me a call” at the end of a conversation you’re having or sending a note to someone after you interacted with them to let them know you appreciated the conversation and would be open to more. In my opinion, you really don’t need to say much more than that. If they value your perspective and want to establish a potential mentorship relationship with you, this is the point at which a potential mentee should feel comfortable enough to engage – you've opened the door.
If you aren’t in a professional organization, it may become quite a bit trickier to let potential mentees know you’re available. Fortunately, we do have some technology on our side. I know I mentioned LinkedIn profiles last week, but this might actually be a great place cultivate this kind of a relationship. If you see someone who you know is early in their career or journey posting something, make a comment on it - especially if you have a differing point of view that may help them see a different perspective. The idea is to engage in a back-and-forth, and then you can drop them a note to say something very similar to what I mentioned above; that you’d be interested in continuing the conversation if they are interested.
Of course, simply being open to mentoring may not be enough to make it a good fit that is beneficial for both. This isn’t always easy to assess – especially in your own office environment. In fact, your own office may be exactly the wrong place to try to develop mentoring roles. If you are in a senior or leadership role, you’re in a position of authority - and it can be awfully hard to mix that authority with providing career advice. Frankly, they can sometimes be in direct conflict. For instance, how fair of a mentor can you be if a highly-valued member of your team is asking for advice on potentially taking on a new role? It’s times like this that you realize how difficult a conflict of interest can be to work through. You may be better served working with someone outside your company or at the very least, outside of your direct reporting line.
A mentor would have for sure told this guy that a long sleeve dress shirt with shorts looks weird.
However, if you have found someone that you really gel with in your company, there are of course ways that you can make it work. I recommend, however, that you should have some very firm ground rules on how it’s going to play out. For instance, there will be times you will likely have to decline to offer advice because it would be inappropriate to do so, or there are times when you’ll have to keep information from your mentee that you know they would benefit from or may be harmed by not knowing. These are concerns that can be navigated if you establish boundaries with your mentee early in the relationship. While I personally would try to avoid establishing a mentoring relationship with someone in my office for these reasons, it’s not an impossible task.
The important thing across all of these scenarios is that that if you’re open to being a mentor, people should know that - or at the very minimum be able to reasonably conclude that you’d be open to doing so. Again, it’s not on you to completely form up the relationship – though you can have a more or less active role in doing so if you really feel strongly about it. For instance, I know one senior executive (not at all in IT) who met someone that they knew had a ton of potential and also knew that this person would never ask to be mentored. So instead of waiting for that to never happen, he offered to take this person to lunch and then offered to help them find a great job. It started out with a single goal and then blossomed into a multi-year mentorship. I would advise that if you’re going to try to initiate something, do so with one person at a time and keep it for a specific goal initially and see where it goes.
That’s actually a nice segue into the next consideration for mentors. I also think it’s important (and wise) for the mentor to help define what the relationship looks like. Once you have an initial conversation, you should set up some guideposts for how the relationship will work. Some questions to consider include: What’s topics are in-scope, and what is not? How frequently should you meet? Is there a specific goal you’re working towards? There are lots of potential variables to a mentoring arrangement, and you should make sure that you’re thinking them through before you start really diving in. Why? Because if you start without a foundation, it’s far more likely that you’re going to start wandering into weird territory and potentially sabotage the mentorship. For example, perhaps you have strong philosophical differences about money than your mentee. It’s possible that your suggestions on running a budget (personal or departmental) may be wholly unwelcome. It’s important you know that so you don’t sour the relationship.
One of the bigger questions that I think many mentor/mentee pairs don’t consider is the duration of your arrangement. While I’ve primarily been talking about the impact of long-term mentors throughout this blog series, there is a strong case to be made for shorter-term arrangements as well. Perhaps you need some help with making a presentation, or you are trying to get a promotion or a new job. Once those things happen, it’s possible that the mentoring component of your relationship ends along with the achievement of the goal. Such an ephemeral arrangement is okay. It may even be something desirable by one or both parties that a mentoring arrangement be for a specific use. Mentoring can be a serious time commitment, and you shouldn’t go into an indefinite arrangement without making sure it’s the right thing to do for all involved. My advice is to re-evaluate whether it’s providing benefit every six months or so, especially if you and the mentee don’t know each other very well at the outset. I would further recommend that you be upfront and explicit about this with your mentee. Let them know that this isn’t a lifetime appointment, and that if they don’t feel it’s a good fit that you won’t be offended – and neither should they.
Don’t worry, this guy definitely isn’t a Bond villain, what with him having spaceships, massive power generation capability, artificial intelligence capability, and now control of the media. Seems like a perfectly altruistic individual.
Speaking of benefits, don’t forget that mentoring should never be a one-way street. Without falling into the trap of trying to quantify benefits to mentee or mentor, you should be getting something out of the relationship as well. I’ve seen articles mention that a Gen Z employee may be seeking mentorship in leadership, but can offer to provide some training or knowledge transfer on social media. Candidly, I hate this example, because if you’re an IT leader and don’t know how to use Elon Musk’s new toy Twitter, then I seriously question your digital literacy. Still, the idea that a mentor should be benefitting from the arrangement is very valid, and you should think through what benefit you are getting as well. Yes, there should be a strong element of altruism in your desire to mentor, but if it’s all give and nothing in return then your likelihood of burnout is much higher. This return can be as simple as spending time with someone who gives you insight into how someone from a different background thinks, or it can be a dose of fresh humor that you don’t usually get. The point is that you should find some level of value in this connection or it will be very draining.
My final bit of advice for a potential mentor is to remember what it was like for you when you were more junior. I would argue that in many organizations, advancement may be harder today than it was before. It used to be that anyone who knew how to get to a command prompt could write their own ticket, but today the requirements for demonstrable technical skills are much higher. That means that it may be harder for newer IT professionals to “figure it out” on their own. That’s why your support and guidance can be transformative for them. While you may know how powerful understanding Terraform can be for someone, they may not even know what it is. Sometimes, just providing the perspective of someone who sees what the market is searching for can be powerful.
Sometimes mentorship can be as simple as making sure that your potential mentee is as well-rounded as possible. Perhaps you have someone who has fantastic technical credibility, but doesn’t have the polish or communication skills to really shine in the office. Recently, Ariel Sanchez – a friend of mine – said that “if you can do tech well and can communicate clearly, the sky is the limit.” I believe this with all of my heart. One of the biggest benefits of having a mentor is to have someone who will give you feedback kindly, someone who can tell you that your communication skills need refining or your emails are incomprehensible. Of course, it’s possible that they are great communicators but not strong enough with their chosen technology skills. Regardless of where your mentee’s strengths and weaknesses lie, help them figure out if they need to build themselves up on one side of that equation or the other and then tell them.
If nothing else, I want to impress upon you that you have a responsibility to pass on your knowledge and wisdom to others. There is a generation of IT Pros who can benefit from your experience and earned knowledge. I think you’d be doing them all a disservice to hoard it. After all, wisdom is a little like water: when it’s moving and flowing freely it’s life-giving and can make anywhere fertile, but when stagnant, it can get a scum on top and smells bad. If you had a mentor, talk about that. Help normalize the idea of mentoring and being mentored. If enough IT Professionals see that successful folks who went before them benefitted from mentoring, it’s likely that they will want to do the same thing. And ultimately, that’s the whole point – to have a virtuous cycle of mentorship that keeps making things better for the people that come after us.
Questions for reflection:
Would you consider being a mentor? How would you let people know you’re open to it?
How long do you think the ideal mentoring arrangement would last?
Do you think IT as a profession would be better off if mentoring were more common? Why or why not?
