The first type of mentorship relationship we’ll cover is the temporary employee. For most tech companies, this is a summer intern, some bright student still in the midst of earning a degree and looking to get some valuable experience by working for your company. The screening process for such students varies; many companies view these opportunities as a pipeline to hiring great talent straight out of college, but if you’re taking on someone who is more than a year from graduation, it’s more realistic to expect that the candidate will a) know very little, and b) probably go elsewhere next year for his internship unless he has an amazing experience. No pressure.
So you find yourself mentoring a college student with little real experience. How can you make sure that his summer is awesome? Even if your company doesn’t love him, you want him to love you, because he’ll go back and tell all his friends about the summer he had working for your company. That can have a big impact on your ability to hire full-time from the graduating class, and the fact that you pulled interns from that school probably indicates a serious interest in hiring new graduates full-time as well. But don’t worry! Making interns happy isn’t rocket science.
The first thing you need is some sort of project for this intern to work on. It would be nice if you, as the mentor, weren’t stuck coming up with the idea for this project, because doing so can be a daunting task. Without a project, your intern has a good chance of being completely lost and bored the entire summer. Figuring out what to do in a workplace is hard enough for experienced hires, so it’s an especially tall order for an intern. You have to have a project in mind — at least something to get him started for the first couple of weeks. If you’re truly drawing a blank, look at small features of your own current project that would take you a few days to complete, and start there.
The intern’s first few days will be similar to those of any new hire: onboarding, getting used to the office, meeting people, learning the systems. Sit with him as much as possible these first few days. Get him started installing the IDE and checking out the code. Touch base several times a day to make sure he’s not feeling lost or overwhelmed by the volume of new information. In the meantime, prepare yourself for his project.
Once you have a project, start applying your budding knowledge of project management to the task at hand. Is this project broken down into milestones? If not, spend a little time in the first few days of the intern’s tenure breaking it down. Walk through the breakdown with your intern. Does it make sense to him? Listen to his questions and answer them. Remember, you’re practicing skills that you will need should you decide in the future to become a manager. In this case, these skills are listening, communicating what needs to happen, and adjusting to his responses.
Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people. Listening is a precursor to empathy, which is one of the core skills of a quality manager. You need this skill wherever your career takes you; even principal engineers with no reports need to be able to hear what others are really saying. So, when your mentee is speaking to you, pay attention to your own behavior. Are you spending all your time thinking about what you want to say next? Are you thinking about your own work? Are you doing anything other than listening to the words coming out of his mouth? If so, you’re not listening well.
One of the early lessons in leadership, whether it is via direct management or indirect influence, is that people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand. We have yet to achieve Borg hive mind or Vulcan mind meld, so we’re constantly pushing complex ideas through the eye of the needle of language. And language is not something that most engineers have mastered in nuance and interpretation. So listening goes beyond hearing the words your mentee is saying. When you’re face to face with another person, you also have to interpret his body language and the way he’s saying those words. Is he looking you in the eye? Is he smiling? Frowning? Sighing? These small signals give you a clue as to whether he feels understood or not.
Be prepared to say anything complex a few times, in different ways. If you feel that you don’t understand something your mentee has asked you, repeat the question in a different way. Let him correct you. Use those whiteboards scattered around your office, if necessary, to draw diagrams. Spend the time that you need to spend to feel understood, and like you understand the mentee. And remember that you’re in a position of huge power in your mentee’s eyes. He’s probably nervous about screwing this opportunity up, trying his best to please you, and trying hard not to look stupid. He may not ask questions even when he doesn’t understand things. Make your life easier and get those questions out of him. The odds of you spending all of your time answering questions are slim compared to the odds that your intern will go off in the absolute wrong direction because he didn’t ask enough questions.
With that said, what if the intern does spend too much time asking you for help, without ever looking for help himself? Well, that gives you an opportunity to work on another management skill: communicating what needs to happen. If you expect him to do research on his own before asking you a question, tell him so! Ask him to explain a piece of code to you, or some product or process, and point him to the documents that you believe explain it. If he can’t do it even with pointers, well, you’re starting to learn something about the potential of this intern. If all else fails, give him the first milestone of the project and tell him to work on it alone for a day or two. Therein lies the value of breaking the project down before the intern starts working on it: you’ve taken on some of the harder thinking up front. He may surprise you by finishing everything much faster than you anticipated, but what a happy surprise to have! Generally, you’ll need to provide some nudging and clarity along the way to keep the intern going in the right direction.
This brings us to the final management skill for you to practice: adjusting to the intern’s responses. So many things can happen in the course of this mentoring relationship. He can far outstrip your expectations. He can struggle with simple tasks. He can produce work very quickly, but it’s of poor quality, or he can work very slowly to produce something that’s overly perfect. In the first few weeks of the internship, you’re learning the frequency that you need to check in with him to provide the right adjustments. It may be once a week. It may be once a day. It may be less frequently than once a week, but I would recommend trying to check in once a week regardless, and spending any extra time as an additional interview/sell cycle for the company.
Hopefully, the summer ends on good terms. He completed a project that has some value. You got practice listening, communicating, and adjusting. He leaves thinking happy thoughts about your company, and you have gained some insight as to whether you want to do this management thing now, soon, or ever. Congratulations!