What you measure, you improve. As a manager you help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals. So often, we fail to apply this basic wisdom to the process of assigning mentors, but it applies here as much as anywhere else. When you need to assign a mentor for your new hire or intern, figure out what you’re hoping to achieve by creating the relationship. Then, find the person who can help meet those goals.
First of all, figure out why you are setting up this mentoring relationship in the first place. In the two cases I discussed earlier, the mentoring relationship existed for a very specific purpose: helping a new person on the team, whether a full-time new hire or someone who will only be around for a few months, get up to speed and be productive. Of course, those aren’t the only kind of mentoring programs that companies run. Sometimes people set up mentoring programs to help junior people pair with senior people outside of their team, for career or skills growth. These programs can be nice, but often the mentor and mentee are given very little guidance beyond the fact that they have been matched together. Most of the time, these programs yield very little to either party. If the mentor is not engaged or is too busy to spend any time on this project, it’s a disappointment for the mentee. If the mentee doesn’t know how to ask for help or what to do with the mentoring relationship, it often feels like forced socializing and a waste of time for both parties. So if your company is setting up mentoring programs outside of new hires and interns, try to make sure that there is some guidance and structure to the program before you push people into it.
Secondly, recognize that this is an additional responsibility for the mentor. If the mentor does a good job, her productivity may slow down some during the mentoring period. If you’ve got an engineer involved in a time-sensitive project, you may not want to push him into mentoring at the same time. Because this is an additional responsibility, treat it as you would any other important additional responsibility you might hand out. Look for someone that you believe can succeed in the role, and who wants to distinguish herself beyond her coding ability.
Whatever the source of the mentoring arrangement, common mentoring pitfalls include viewing it as a low-status “emotional labor” position, assuming that “like” must mentor “like,” and failing to use the opportunity to observe potential on your team firsthand.
Emotional labor is a way to think about traditionally feminine “soft skills” — that is, skills that address the emotional needs of people and teams. Because the outcome can be hard to quantitatively measure, emotional labor is often dismissed as less important work than writing software. It’s assumed to be something that should just be provided without financial recognition. I’m not suggesting that you should pay people extra money to serve as mentors, but they need to be recognized for the work they put in, and the mentor should be treated as a first-class citizen with respect to other responsibilities the person might have. As I said before, plan for it, and provide the mentor the time to do the job right. You have already invested in creating this mentoring relationship, whether it’s the thousands of dollars and many hours spent on hiring, or the overhead and coordination of creating a mentoring program. It’s worth continuing the investment through to fruition by recognizing that mentoring is work that takes time, but also yields valuable returns in the form of better employee networks, faster onboarding, and higher internship conversion.
When I ask you to not assume that like must mentor like, I mean that you should not expect women to only mentor women, and men to only mentor men, people of color (PoC) to only mentor other PoC, and so on. This comes up a lot in mentorship programs. These types of mentoring relationships have their place, but as a woman in tech, I personally get tired of the only mentoring being focused around lines of diversity. As you’re thinking about creating mentorship relationships, unless the purpose of the mentoring program is driven from a diversity focus, give people the best mentor for their situation. Like mentoring like does make sense in one case — namely, having mentors from similar job roles. When the mentoring is expected to have a job skills training component, the best mentors are going to be people who are further along in their mastery of the job skills that the mentee is trying to develop.
Finally, use this opportunity to reward and train future leaders on your team. As you know by now, leadership requires human interaction to exist. Developing patience and empathy is an important part of the career path of anyone working in a team-based environment. Brilliant, introverted developers may not ever want to formally manage, but encouraging them to mentor 1-1 helps them develop stronger external perspectives, not to mention their own networks. Conversely, an impatient young engineer may find a degree of humility when tasked with helping an intern succeed (under your supervision).