Tips for Mentoring Others

In this post, I plan to share a few tough on mentoring others.
 

I may not be the most experience of all IT people, I got around six years of total experience, at the time of this writing in 2020, however, very often at various job roles, I have been tasked with mentoring other team members. It seems like most people tend to avoid the extra responsibility that being a mentor brings - just think about it: you have your own daily job duties and on top of that you get an additional burden of having to make somebody become a productive team member, often going from zero to hero. When you got patience and friendly personality people tend to volunteer you to be a mentor for new team members. At first, I somewhat vexed by this - why do I always have to be the one responsible for onboarding the newbies and holding their hand? After a little while, I realized, that while mentoring can be cumbersome and demanding it's also a very valuable experience - even though this sounds like a complete cliche if there ever was one, I stand by what I said 100%!

First of all, you have to have clearly defined goals and you need to be able to clearly present your mentee with the objectives they are expected to achieve. Often I've witnessed mentors complaining about how their mentees are not making any progress, but they have not clearly defined and explained what are the expectations placed before the said mentee. It is completely unfair for a mentor to be disappointed in their student if the students are not clear on what to aim for!

You should have a sufficient level of knowledge in order to be a good mentor, my first few roles as a mentor I was expected to pass down domain knowledge about the company's product, while technically educating the mentees was not primarily due to the nature of the job - a little over the level of basic IT literacy was expected as it was a technical support/customer service kind of a role. In order to explain something properly you will need to have a deep understanding of the subject, I could not teach nuclear physics to anyone, but when it comes to, software testing or, fictional Star Wars history I could teach the shit out that!

Third point - having respect for your pupil! Just because someone is green doesn't mean that you have the right to talk down to them or to keep berating that person for their ignorance. We were all beginners at some point so being too harsh on your mentee is counterproductive. It will make them resent learning and negatively affect their professional self-esteem. So don't be an overly lenient spinelles nice guy, but don't be an arrogant tyrant either. After all, arrogance is nothing but a mask for people who are deeply insecure in their own abilities! 

So to conclude, be respectful, have clearly defined expectations, and don't be stingy when it comes to knowledge sharing!