Mentorship via Frew
_This document is to give people a taste of how my mentorship style works. It is part of a broader workshop that some of the Sr Staff and above folks are running at ZipRecruiter to help equip other engineers to be better mentors. This is meant to give people ideas, help them come up with questions, and start conversations.
🔗 Mentee Driven
The way I prefer to mentor is for the mentee to approach me and ask for mentorship. I might tell their manager or a nearby leader that I am willing and think it could help, but that the mentee should reach out. I want the mentee to start the relationship as the initiator. When they first meet with me I try to ask them: “what are your goals?” In each meeting the mentee sets the agenda; it is vanishingly rare that I choose the topics for the meeting.
I set the expectation with mentees that they come prepared with topics and questions. The first meeting is reserved for the initial goal setting. If they come with solid, clear goals, that’s great. Often they need help refining or sometimes verbalizing them. That’s ok. My preference is they have at most three goals, preferably one.
🔗 Share Experience and Perspective
The mentee driven dynamic continues into the recurring meetings. In recurring meetings the mentee will start with some problem they are experiencing. The mentee will get nothing if I misunderstand them, so my pattern is to restate the problem in brief first. Next I come at the problem from a number of different angles, starting broad and following with focussed suggestions.
An example: an engineer told me that they were having trouble communicating in a way that would not upset other engineers. They connected to me in what seemed like a last-ditch effort to address this issue. This engineer had the perspective that blunt statements of fact were the only way to be honest. I shared a different way to look at it: if other engineers do not understand you, your honesty is just smoke. The goal of being honest is to communicate truth, which means you must speak such that your audience can hear you. This was a significant perspective shift for this engineer.
After that, I shared a number of tactics that could help: bounce messages through ChatGPT to manage tone, read Crucial Conversations, give all messages a cooldown (ie avoid answering quickly,) use more hangouts and less slack, and more.
This is the general pattern of how I mentor: start with some problem, then talk about a broad general topic, and then suggest tactical solutions.
🔗 Feedback
I pay attention. Eventually I see broader patterns that are hard to come at via the structure above. When this happens I share feedback candidly, clearly, and quickly. When I give feedback I try to share multiple examples of the pattern. (I suggest starting with the Situation Behavior Impact structure.) My preference is to give the feedback directly via slack, with an open offer to have a quick (~15m) hangout to discuss, and I usually send a copy of the feedback to their manager, so their manager can help support the mentee’s growth.
Feedback can be about literally anything, but the two most common categories are: stuff within the mentee’s current level, and stuff at the mentee’s next level. Not everyone wants to be promoted, but everyone should strive to meet expectations within their level.
🔗 Managers
Regarding managers: as a high level IC some portion of what I do is to help managers understand high level roles. A typical manager will not fully understand what the expectations are for a Staff Engineer, and I spend some time addressing this. This is mostly during the transition from Senior to Staff, but can apply at any level.
🔗 Chorin’
Some industry advice seems to assume that mentorship is a kind of apprenticeship, where the mentee does work “for” the mentor. I cannot stress enough how wrong-headed this seems to me. The most I will ever ask my mentee to do is take on a task that is at the right level for them but the wrong level for me, but only if this is an opportunity for them. I don’t selfishly mentor in any way, and would actively recommend against it.
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