Introduction

Since I was a young engineer I always loved the idea of having a mentor. Someone that could guide me, validate and challenge my ideas and help me become a better professional. I feel that this would be particular helpful when I was a junior engineer striving to overcome my impostor syndrome. However, I never got the chance of having such a mentor. That left me thinking that it would be nice to be able to provide that for others. This led me to drive the creation of an official mentorship program within a department of my current company.

When I was first trying to design the main lines of the program I noticed that information regarding mentorship programs is scarce and spared. Due to this I had to come up with a structure for the program based on the information I could find.

This article outlines the main structure of the program in case someone finds it useful and wants to apply it elsewhere.

Program Definition

Main goals

Provide the mentees with someone to help them and guide them on career progress, providing guidance in both technical and soft skills.
Improve the mentoring skills of mentors.
Accelerate the growth of our people and making them ready for the next-level position faster.
Strive for cross-team mentorship relationships to potentiate networking.
Grow the company as a whole by leveraging internal talent to help people grow.

Audience

The program was created for backend engineers, frontend engineers and quality assurance engineers. In principle it can be applied at all levels of the engineering hierarchy and each level can be mentored by someone at the level above (someone who as the required skills as described below).

Skills: what are we trying to improve?

The main focus of the program will be to improve soft skills. Stuff such as:

Ownership
Collaboration
Communication
Assertiveness + Humbleness
Pragmatism on technical design
Leadership
Decision making
Navigate through ambiguity
Ability to adapt
Innovation
Proactivity

Nevertheless it can also be used to provide guidance in more technical matters if it makes sense to.

It is important to note that the mentor will not be responsible for teaching all these skills to the mentee. The mentor will only be responsible to identify weak points and provide an orientation to the mentee so that he can improve in those areas.

Expectations: what is expected from both the mentor and the mentee?

The mentor, mentee and the mentee’s manager should gather in the beginning of the program and list the goals of the mentoring program for that specific person: this should list a few skills in which to work on (but more can be addressed after of course)
Mentor should be in direct contact with the manager and tech lead of the mentee so that everyone is aligned on the best way to make the mentee to grow. This is useful for the mentor to have feedback from others on the mentee.
Mentees should have ownership of the mentor ↔︎ mentee relationship and not simply wait for an intervention of the mentor.
Mentees should do a self-analysis of what they think that lack (maybe one of the conditions of the program is the mentee to write a self-analysis document to promote ownership and proactivity)
Mentee’s manager should maintain contact with the mentor to evaluate the progress of the initiative

Mentors: how to find them

The process of choosing mentors capable of providing useful guidance is tricky. We want to find people that are competent in their jobs but that, by itself, it is not enough. They have to know how to mentor, enjoy doing it and participating with the goal of selflessly helping others. We think that the best way to find such people is by referral. People who showed these skills and traits in the past and that are capable of doing that in the mentorship environment.

Pairing Process: how should we pair mentors and mentees?

There are 2 alternatives:

If the person already has a mentor in sight and that mentor is available for mentoring, the pairing can be automatically done
For more introvert persons or for persons that do not know any mentor we can have a meeting between the manager and the mentors “club” to find a right fit.

Timeline: for how long should the 1:1 mentorship last?

ZenithTimeline

The time window defined for the mentoring program is 6 months. The main timeline of the project goes as follows:

Application Process: Start the process to match mentors with mentees. Each applicant must submit an application form. The project organization should help defining the mentorship pairings to be established.
Mentor-Mentee Partnership Established: At this phase all mentorship pairings should be established.
Mentor-Mentee Kick-off Meeting: Have an initial kick-off meeting that could be based on this document.
Mentee Goal Definition Document: After the initial kick-off meeting the mentee should write a document stating the goals for the mentorship
Mentor-Mentee Goal Definition Document Review: After the document being written it should be review by the mentor.
Mentee’s Manager Goal Definition Document Presentation: After the review of the mentor the document should be presented to the mentee’s manager.
Mentor and mentee’s manager should align outside of the recurrent catch-ups. The strategy can be defined individually per mentorship pairing.

At the end of the program it would be useful to gather feedback from the participants to improve future iterations. For that we have this mentor form and this mentee form.

We’ve created several templates to support these key moments. They are available here.

1st Iteration Key Takeaways

I was able to implement this program on my company and the first iteration was successful according to the feedback received from all participants. After carefully analyzing the feedbacks we were able to gather these key takeaways

Mentee-mentor gap assessment
- Gaps between junior-mid and mid-senior levels were manageable
Office presence helps
- More frequent help
- Timelier responses and feedback
Pre-existing relationships between mentor and mentee are beneficial
- Built-in trust and familiarity
- Easier to get the sense of a safe space
The duality between formality & flexibility is important
- Formal mentorship moments adds seriousness to the program
- Flexibility allows customized approaches per mentorship pair
Lack of mentee time for self-development can impact the benefits of the mentorship
- Some mentees struggled to find time for mentorship goals
- Balancing work and mentorship was challenging for participants
Deep mentee involvement boosts mentorship
- Mentees that recurrently came up with topics for discussion took better advantage of the mentorship
Mentor-Mentee role similarity helps in the mentorship
- Having mentors in the same field was advantageous
- Relevant expertise and understanding of mentee’s role
- Technical advices are leveraged to increase confidence and decrease impostor syndrome
Mentoring works best when mentors use suggestions instead of directives
- Mentors should encourage the mentee to drive the discussions.
Mentee having a safe space to discuss ideas helps them grow
- Mentees are more comfortable in speaking up
- The proactivity within their teams increases due to previous validation
Appropriate goal setting can dictate the success of the mentorship
- Specific, actionable goals are easier to pursue
- Too generic goals are harder to maintain focus on
External challenges may influence the mentorship
- Changes in management or challenging project deadlines
- Mentee has to maintain focus to achieve its own goals despite the external influences

Conclusion

We’re now progressing to the second iteration of the program, with the hope of leaving the world in a slightly better state than we found it.