October 4, 2023 Leadership, Opinion, Personal
Ever watched a martial arts movie? There is always a Sensei behind the main character – usually a much more experienced, older, and wiser person willing to share their knowledge. Career, life, or software engineering isn’t exactly the same (maybe metaphorically?), but in the very same way, it is always a great idea to be inspired by and learn things from someone who has already been through the journey you are embarking on.
I don’t think I can give justice to the topic of mentorship holistically (go search the internet for that or ask Bard to generate bullet points for you), though I can share my own experiences. In part this is what mentorship is all about, see if there is anything for you below:
In my early career back in Ukraine I was lucky to get direct exposure to our clients from the USA as this helped with my English but I was also lucky to work with talented and highly energetic technical leader and a Microsoft MVP (most-valuable-professional). He was a lot of inspiration for me and probably was the reason for starting this blog and effectively jump-starting my career (tech blogging was very popular back in ~2010). Moving through my career I met many engineers who were highly skilled, had diverse technical backgrounds (think software for Ferrary F1, or for British military, or high frequency trading, or nuclear energy, etc). So I tried to challenge myself to learn from them. Very specifically, one of the annual goals I had in 2016 was “Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.” I might not have been exceptionally successful in achieving that particular goal but at least I learned to appreciate that others know cool things I don’t. Once I moved to work for big tech (Amazon & now Google) I normally tried to maintain “official” mentorship relationship(s) via internal mentorship programs/platforms.
My experience with “official” mentors so far has been mixed. As always, it all depends on the person and how two of us connect, but in all of the cases mentors have always provided something of a value to me. It was never-ever time wasted. At the very least, a mentor will help you get an outsider perspective on you situation and answer your questions from different perspective other than your manager might. There is no guarantee that you will agree to what they say or that their recommendations will be ideally applicable to you but it is your job to work through those and figure out the best you can get out additional point of view.
I worked with few of my mentors on my promotions. It is always great to get a mentor one or two levels higher as they have a lot more understanding of what it takes to get promoted to the next level and they might actually be part of promo review process for that level. In fact, I feel like I got a lot of information from one of my mentors I otherwise wouldn’t be able to get from my manager.
Other than promotions, the other area I worked on with my mentors was understanding of my next career moves. For instance, one good advise I got was to always get most out of any situation before making any radical decisions. At the same time, I also got “never moving fish is a dead fish” and other types of advise, all of which have had their impact on me.
Third area of engagmeent with my mentors was in building vision/strategy and presenting it to leadership. A very specific advise (and, maybe, a bit weird) was to actually visualize that I’m that leader I’m going to present the strategy to and try to understand what would that leader pay attention to when listening to the presentation. I was actually asked to role play during mentorship discussion, which felt really weird, but I wouldn’t have tried this if I didn’t have this “weird” mentor.
I know that I’ve been a bit of an inspiration for some engineers in the past and this realization was a great source of energy for myself as well as a motivation to self-improve further. Regretfully I’ve lost a lot of drive to be an example or an inspiration to others. I’ve also find it more difficult to be inspired by someone. Don’t take me wrong, not that there are not enough great people around (if anything, my collegues are one of the best and truly remarkable people), it is probably just me getting older and grumpy. In a way I miss those times but on a higher note writing this blog post helped me recall good times I had and motivate myself to be a more active individual in this regard. I currently have a mentee and keep in touch with few former collegues which whom I exchange career advise.
Looking back at my past mentorship relationships I can confidently say that they helped me. Go ahead and get yourself a mentor and if you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate and take a moment to teach someone something you know, chances are you might benefit in the process as well.
2 comments
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So where do you “get yourself a mentor”? if there is no such official program in your company, do you just go and ask people “wanna be my mentor? I will buy you coffee once a week”?
Generally the post is very “traurig”, just some facts (“it helped me”) but a lot of sadness. Sorry to read this. HUGS from far away.
I don’t think it is really that “traurig”. Yes, I did mention being less inspired and somewhat less active compared to my younger self, but at the same time I tried to make it clear that mentorship did help me (even if I explained this in a factual matter with examples), and that I still engage in mentroship relationships. Majority of people don’t have mentors and thus I tried to call for an action here.
I acknowledge that without an official company program it is harder to find a mentor as you don’t explicitly know if anyone would be open to a mentorship.
Here is what I tried in the past and I think should work: figure out few people whom you admire and would like to learn a thing or two from and then ask for a very specific advise. From the way they respond you might get an idea on how willing they might be and if any of them seems can be your mentor. Not sure if bribing with a coffee would work :) You might be thinking along the lines “why would anyone spend time on mentoring you”. I think (coffee aside) there are few things: mentor might get an exposure to the area of work you are in and this could help them grow in the company, mentor might be just happy to help and be energized by that, mentor might learn from you as well so there is no harm in presenting your strong sides as well, mentor might simply be helping you because they were helped by someone before (ponzi scheme anyone?). When I engage with a new mentor I normally have two paragraph’s in my e-mail, they are: 1) What do I hope to get out of this mentorship? 2) What do you get out of this?
Another approach you can take is to “pay it forward” and actually start by mentoring someone before finding a mentor for yourself. Might sound daunting at first, but this can help you understand motivation of a mentor and you are very likely see how this pushes you to be better yourself.
Thanks for the hugs :)