Learning mentoring

Disclosure: I have never been in a successful formal mentoring relationship and I would not be comfortable presenting myself as an expert in any soft skills.

It took me a while to see it, but I do have plenty of experience of informal mentoring relationships, both professionally and from raising kids, you probably do too. Most of the advice for formal mentoring also seems to be applicable. After reading this I’m hoping you will start to recognize various activities as informal mentoring situations, where such advice can be applied; increasing the value of those activities. The following is my attempt at distilling information I’ve found along with reflections and experiences from my process of learning the topic.

I think the essence of mentoring is about asking questions; the mentee (receiver of guidance) asks questions about something they want to learn, whereas the mentors main task is to come up with questions to help guide the mentees thought process (Socratic method).

Informal mentoring; You’re already doing it

Onboarding, pair programming and code reviews are all common structured activities where it sort of happens naturally. The initial promoters of those activities probably saw the connection, but it didn’t occur to me until I started looking into mentoring advice. Raising kids is another avenue where I think it applies.

Mentee perspective

Mentoring is something you do to yourself with the help of other people. You need to be an active participant to get any value from it. You can even get the benefits of such a relationship without the counterpart realizing they’re acting as a mentor. My experience is that most people in this field enjoy sharing knowledge, figure out what you want to learn and start asking questions.

Do not be afraid to ask questions, but try to make them good ones; good questions pinpoint a specific part of a topic you’re interested in learning. Also consider the timing, if you’re currently under unusual pressure it might be better to save them for later when things have calmed down.

I’ve had a few colleagues where I really knew at the time that I could learn a lot from them and tried to maximize that by asking lots of questions. I did learn a lot from them and were never told to shut it, nor have I heard any remarks that I’d been a bother afterwards.

One of them is a colleague I still have and talk with regularly, when I asked him about that period his response was that he’d just thought of me as a colleague with us solving problems together and he found it interesting that I thought he’d been acting like a mentor at the time.

Supply feedback to your mentor. Let them know how you applied what you learned, what worked and what didn’t or if there’s any improvements you can think of. The feedback cycle is a problem with any soft skill, so if you can think of a way to help out, do it.

Mentor perspective

Acting as a mentor is a great way to practice leadership/social skills. You will also be learning more about the specific topic in a process of refining your knowledge and filling in gaps as you learn about them (Feynman technique). Learning by teaching is a teaching method applied in schools and universities.

Making the mentee comfortable

Help the mentee overcome the discomfort/fear of asking questions.

Connect, getting to know each other and building trust is an important aspect of a fruitful mentoring relationship.

Help build confidence, celebrate achievements and help view mistakes as learning opportunities. Focus on choices and behaviors rather than outcomes.

Why are questions better?

Let’s start by looking at how we raise our kids. Kids explore the world by experimenting and are very curious. I want to keep that curiosity alive, I want them to keep exploring and experimenting, figure things out and feel like they can accomplish anything. I think the best way of accomplishing that is to learn to guide them through those journeys with questions. After an intense day of work I might be tired and just want them to listen and do as they’re told, but what would the result be if I succeeded in making them blindly follow orders? Do you think those ideas apply differently to your kids compared to those new junior developers on your team?

By asking questions you are improving your understanding of the problem and their view on it, while also making them think more closely about the parts you ask about; increasing the odds of them coming up with a solution on their own. Even if you don’t manage to conduct the process all the way there, you have increased the odds of you helping them solve the correct problem and they will have a better understanding of everything that was explored meanwhile. You probably learned something on the way too and perhaps came up with a better solution than what you initially thought or did previously. Minimizing direct guidance empowers and encourages curiosity.

Crafting guiding questions

Sounds easy right? Just ask questions instead and at the same time you’re giving yourself more time to come up with a good answer. I think it’s really hard, especially in professional settings where I’m in problem solving-mode most of the time and it feels like there’s always some kind of pressure to produce, even if it’s just the self-imposed one about what it costs the client that I’m there.

Try to hold off that urge to respond or share a related experience, listen and instead try to come up with a question. Unless you’re completely sure you are thinking about the same problem, start off with questions to make sure. That also gives you a bit more time for the harder part, coming up with what details or related topics are crucial to understanding the problem. Proceed with asking questions about those parts to trigger deeper reflection. You might arrive at the response you were thinking about initially, but you may also have learned about some aspect you didn’t think about, leading to an even better response. Evaluate them together.

For software engineering it’s often about coming up with and evaluating solutions to a problem. You might’ve seen the problem before and even tried applying different solutions for it and formed an opinion of a favorite. Be open to a new one you never thought about possibly being an even better alternative and encourage exploration and experimentation.

The way we conduct a post mortem is basically a guide for directing ourselves through such a process. Layer by layer of issues, we keep asking why to trigger deeper reflection until we think we’ve uncovered the root cause. We then proceed to ask ourselves what we could do to prevent similar problems in the future and which of those ideas we can economically justify pursuing.

Process of improvement

Optimizing any process is in essence about finding, creating or amplifying feedback loops, while employing systems thinking and measurement to focus improvements where they will have the best impact. In an informal setting we don’t really have the option of redesigning those loops, atleast not in a way I can think of. We can however amplify the feedback loops by more intently observing and asking for feedback. Formal mentorship programs are in control of those loops and a well designed such program and might therefore be a really good idea, but I’ll save digging into that part for some future post.

Keep learning. Reflect on your mentoring, what worked and what didn’t? Observe the impact of your methods and the progression of the relationship. Ask for feedback. Sometimes I find myself reflecting on some immediate answer as a missed opportunity other times a feeling of having responded to the wrong question. That’s a good thing, it means I’m starting to identify the opportunities and even if it wasn’t helpful for the other party in that case, I’m learning and hopefully I’ll do better next time.

Aiming for peer relationship

The mentor to mentee configuration isn’t rigid, the closer the two of you are in proficiency/experience, the more often this swings back and forth, making it more and more of a peer relationship (mentor to mentor). Considering it’s always easier to learn the first 10% of a topic than the last 10% and the fact that you are an awesome mentor, that relationship should be moving more and more towards a peer relationship, be nice.