how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities.
- Mentoring: lending advice and helping to problem solve based on your own experience.
- Coaching: asking open questions to help your teammate reflect and introspect, rather than sharing your own opinions or quickly problem solving.
- Sponsoring: finding opportunities for your teammate to level up, take on new leadership roles, and get promoted.
- Delivering feedback: observing behavior that is or isn’t aligned to what the team needs to be doing and sharing those observations, along with praise or suggestions.
NOTE: When I was taking a job interview, a manager told me that a good team mate have a good EQ (Emotional Intelligence).
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Motivation
- Empathy
- Social skills
NOTE: One of senior developer's jobs is to make another senior developer.
Do this: Giving advice, sharing perspectives, helping someone else problem solve.
For what: Help the other person overcome a roadblock, lead to the next step to take, avoid drastic errors.
As mentors, we want our mentees to reach beyond us, because our mentees’ success is ultimately our success.
Mentor shares what you would do, or what you have done in the situation.
Do this: Asking open questions, reflecting
The best open questions are about the problem, not the solution.
We want to avoid the following types of questions:
- Questions start with WHY tend to make other person feel judged.
- Questions start with HOW tend to go into problem solving.
Instead, use WHAT!
- What’s most important to you about it?
- What’s holding you back?
- What does success look like?
- What would you be able to do in the new level that you can’t do in your current one?
- What skills are required in the new level? What are some ways that you’ve honed those skills?
- Who are the people already at that level that you want to emulate? What about them do you want to emulate?
Open questions, asked from a place of genuine curiosity, help people feel seen and heard. However, if the way you ask your questions comes across as judgy or like you’ve already made some assumptions, then your questions aren’t truly open (and your teammate can smell this on you!).
Help your teammates reflect by repeating back to them what you hear them say, as in:
- “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re frustrated with how this project is going. Is that right?”
- “What I know to be true about you is how deeply you care about your teammates’ feelings.”
Coaching mode is all about helping your teammate develop their own brain wrinkles, rather than telling them how you would do something.
NOTE: One-on-one is a good place to do these practices.
NOTE: You could retrospect and observe how your coaching have worked for the other person at the end of a period.
As someone’s sponsor, you’ll put their name in the ring for opportunities that will get them the experience and visibility necessary to grow in their role and at the organization.
- giving visible/public recognition (company “shout outs,” having them present a project demo, thanking them in a launch email, giving someone’s manager feedback about their good work);
- assigning stretch tasks and projects that are just beyond their current skill set, to help them grow and have supporting evidence for a future promotion; or
- opening the door for them to write blog posts, give company or conference talks, or contribute open-source work.