The Emerging Leaders Quandary – can’t get recognised as someone who is ready to lead a larger team.
Why we get stuck – you can’t get that higher level job without the leadership experience… but you can’t get the leadership experience without the job.
Do not outsource your career development to someone who cares less about it than you. You can’t afford to be the best kept secret in your organisation.
How to go out and make a name for yourself in a way that uniquely differentiates you and your values.
Think about how you’re currently perceived by others… and is it working for you? Do people perceive you by the full sum of strengths or do they see you as less than, or completely different? Take steps to understand how others see you.
Advice: “Be famous for something. Know what is your claim to fame.” Example of someone who narrowed down her focus to her greatest strength – building great customer relationships.
Who do you know who has branded themselves well? What catch phrase or brand statement do people use to refer to that individual?
In this workshop:
Identifying your ideal career niche – what is it that you enjoy doing, that is a great match for your strengths, but also makes you sought after.
Your leadership brand. Get people to come to you.
Making your value visible.
What’s your Career Superpower?
Building a really strong, unique, powerful brand for yourself. Understand the three elements:
What are you passionate about?
What are your skills and talents?
What does your company / industry need and value?
If you try and build a career around something you’re great at and passionate about but don’t consider 3, you might end up not with an awesome career but an expensive hobby.
Think about what this looks like for you at this moment in your career?
“Be authentic about your own leadership style. Don’t try to change it. Own it. Communicate it. Put a value on it. Put a brand on it.”
— Dr. Rohini Anand, SVP, Global Chief Diversity Officer, Sodexo
Don’t be a professional pretzel. Start with your ideal niche and brand that.
Brands can have a transformative effect on your career. Start with your ideal career niche, then scale it up have decide what you want to be known for next.
“Make your brand scalable”
— Krista Thomas, VP Marketing, The Rubicon Project
Where do you want to be? Work backwards and decide what you need to be known for now in order to make that happen.
Build a valuable entry level brand. If still known for that 3-4 years later it will really hold you back.
Strategist. Innovator. Subject matter expert. Change agent. People motivator. Project leader. Builds things that work. Turnaround architect. Intrapreneur.
After that, the senior level brand e.g:
Visionary. Thought leader. Leader who develops leaders. Charismatic leader. Rainmaker. Quiet Leader.
How do you not be the best kept secret in the organization?
In school, early career:
Results = Reward + Recognition
At work:
Results + Make them Visible = Reward + Recognition
4 Steps for making your brand visible:
Work less – don’t spend all your time head down delivering results.
Communicate your brand to others.
Work hard on the right projects.
Promote your accomplishments.
Have a 30 second commercial:
Name
Job title and/or brand
I am responsible for a, b, c.
Come directly to me when you need x, y, z.
Work hard on the right projects:
(Most important)
Showcases your brand.
Demonstrate your ability to deliver results.
Other things to consider:
Directly support your organisations strategic plan and goals.
Improve the bottom line.
Perform a specific, not general role (technical track)
Expose you to a new department, function or client (management track).
Push the cutting edge in your field of expertise.
Special projects sponsored by executives.
Sharpen business acumen and leadership skills.
Participate on special task forces and committees.
“It’s not what you know and it’s not who you know.
It’s who knows what you know.”
— Nora Denzel, Interim CEO, Outerwall
Two reasons self-promo backfires:
Way chosen is off-brand, seems inauthentic.
Doing it in a way that isn’t rewarded or recognised by the team culture they are part of.
How to promote accomplishments:
Present in meetings. Invite leaders.
Send out a newsletter or regular status updates.
Submit article to your organisation’s newsletter.
Write a blog, or paper for publication.
Ask to be nominated for an award.
Ask a colleague to “toot your horn”, and reciprocate.
Speak on panels, and at conferences.
Forward kudos emails with “FYI”.
Choose a couple you are willing to try. Practise! And put into action.
“There is nothing untoward about being honest about what you do well.
Your company cannot fully appreciate how to leverage you as a resource if the company does not have visibility into what your unique talents are. So, don’t deny that of your company.
Get out there. Make sure that people see you. Make certain that they know what you do well. And while you’re doing that, make sure that you’re lifting some other people up as you climb.”
The list of things I’ve learned this year is pretty long, but one thing I keep coming back to is: if you want something different, you have to create space for it.
And so I have tried to deliberately create it (with mixed results) but above all be mindful about what (and who) I let in, and what commitments I take on.
It’s easy to say no to “bad” things. But it’s hard to say no to things that are good-but-not-great. I’ve been trying to celebrate saying no, create a reward cycle there.
Last week I had cause to consider what I’ve been doing since leaving tech. I was on a podcast, and it’s one of the things we talked about, I hung out with a friend who just embraced funemployment, and I was thinking about what is next for me.
Perhaps this is a long-winded way to say, I’ve completely come around to something I never thought would be me – leaving the old thing, without knowing what’s next.
Because if you have a job that uses up most of your emotional energy, how do you figure out what’s next whilst doing it?
And time. One thing I’ve observed over the course of a year is that the reasons I left, different ones have loomed larger at different times. The things that were most stressful to me in the last weeks disappeared pretty quickly. When a number of women left and talked about why, those reasons loomed larger. Really they were all a product of one reason: it was time.
But it took time to figure out what should be next. What’s petty and what’s fundamental. What I want to do. What I care about.
A year ago I would have made different decisions than I made last week. And this is always going to be true, hopefully. Because you learn and you develop and different things seem possible. But also we make different decisions from a place of panic and fear than we do from a centred calm. We make different decisions when we focus on our strengths than when our confidence has been eroded away.
As a driven over-achiever type person, the idea that I might “opt out”, give myself space and time was a terrifying one. But nothing I have ever done has been so revelatory, or worthwhile.
Early on in my career, I worked on something that shipped without tests. And I learned something important:
That’s a bad idea.
To frame it positively, I learned that any tests were better than no tests. And so I went away and read things, talked to people, and experimented. And over time I’ve learned a lot and mastered a certain level of competence. I’ve also become the kind of person who writes extensive unit tests on my experimental side projects.
But it’s not uncommon for people in tech to claim they learned their leadership skills, or management skills, from learning what not to do from some terrible leaders and – especially – managers.
There are a number of things wrong with this. Firstly, these create self-perpetuating cycles. We’ve all heard (and often told!) stories of terrible micro-managers, I heard about one who had his team track their time in 30 minute increments (just the thought of this makes me stressed). The result is that many of us fear being the micro-manager, and so we tend to be too hands-off.
The thing is, if you could get past your loathing of the micro-manager and actually listen to what they think they are doing, you might hear a story about how they had a hands-off manager, and didn’t get the support they wanted, so now they are trying… not to be that guy.
So we’re all trying to… not be that guy (I use “guy” deliberately, because the vast majority of the time it is a guy). Cool. I totally believe that guy was a terrible manager, or terrible lead. But that doesn’t mean that we know what the hell we are doing.
So we read things (but mostly ignore all the wider research outside the tech industry), we talk to people (do we know that they know what they are doing? Did they make it up from some other place of things not to do?) and experiment.
Only now our experiments are not with source code. But with people’s careers. In an industry where people’s careers make up an unhealthy level of defining who they are.
I’ve learned a lot of what not to do. But recently I learned something about what to do. Specifically, if you lead through a hard thing, especially something that fails, the best measure of success you have is the relationship you have with the people you led. If you get through it and they still respect and like you, you’ve done something right.
And it made me realise how little we learn when we learn what not to do. And how many unknown unknowns it leaves us with, that will one day come back to bite us.
The other thing I’ve observed recently, is that the way someone treats a new grad, or an intern, says a lot about them. It’s like that tip of seeing how your date treats the waiter.
Yes, some interns and new grads are arrogant and obnoxious. But in general these are the most enthusiastic and positive people you meet. You are amongst their first experience of what people are like in the working world. They are so keen to like the people they work with, and they are the people who we conduct the most brutal experiments of poor management and poor leadership on.
And so, they learn what not to do. They learn not to be that guy, only now that guy is you. And the cycle continues.
Sometimes you have to do the scary thing. So here it is: I’m leaving Google at the end of the month.
Will post more about The Plan at a later date, but for now suffice it to say I’ll be working on some personal projects that I’d love to see if I could turn in to something, and exploring other options. And of course, travelling.
I feel really excited. About the freedom to do what I want, and live where I want for a while, about exploring what’s out there. Of course it’s been sad to say goodbye, but even if the plans are vague right now I do feel like I’m going towards something really compelling.
Over the next couple of months I’ll be speaking at iOSDevUK, GHC, and Oredev. If you’re there, let’s hang out!
Someone tweeted that this post reminded them of my post about leaving. And I read it, finding it oddly compelling (even though I’m not excited by comics, or superheros), and then I found this quote.
it seems to me to be the worst thing in the world to want to do something that badly and then to have your love for it slowly leeched out of you to the point where you don’t want to do it at all anymore
And then I felt like I understood, because yes, this is often how I feel.
Maybe I’m actually doing better than that, because whilst I might have come to hate the tech industry I still love making things.
Two things. One bad, one good.
First thing. I remembered a comment a guy must have made… oh, 6 months ago. I remember my reaction, the double take “oh, did you really?” I think he thought it was a joke. I think jokes should be funny. And I realised, I put this in a box for the last 6 months. I didn’t run into him again, I didn’t think of it again, until I was meditating on the words that get used about women, and only about women, and I remembered this.
Does it really matter? If one guy says something stupid? If he thinks he’s funny when he’s not? I have a relatively dark sense of humour so I probably do that too. One guy, doesn’t matter. One guy each [day|week|month|quarter|year] starts to matter as the [days|weeks|months|quarters|years] go by. They start to add up. And on dark day it’s not one guy making that comment, it’s one guy articulating what they all must think. And eventually the dark days become everyday. The fear of “what next?” becomes crippling and constant. Eventually, it’s time to leave. Maybe that mental departure took place a while ago, a disconnection as a way to cope, but now is finally official, and real.
My coping strategy has just been to push harder, move faster, accelerate. To say, OK, 10 years, tops, make the most of it. Want to push me down? I’ll run faster, diversify, find a way to bounce back up.
Frantic. Frantic. Frantic.
Second thing. Take a deep breath. I am 29 years old. That is not actually that old, really. This reaction, feeling like I am running out of time, is actually just… madness. I have time. It’s not actually an emergency. I don’t need to have all the answers today.
Or even when I do leave. I don’t need to know exactly what is next, or if my departure is real, or permanent. I just need a starting point.
There was an article a while ago with Marissa Mayer’s thoughts on work life balance. Essentially it was that long hours were fine, as long as you didn’t miss out on things that would make you resent it.
I try and work manageable (sustainable!) hours but sometimes my work gets prioritised over my life. And my view is that sometimes that just is my job. Sometimes my job is to be in New York and I happen to get stuck in a snow storm and miss my ski vacation. Sometimes it’s to work over the weekend to get something out, or to stay late because someone needs something finished. That’s just how it is.
But for me, resentment is tired to outcomes. I won’t resent long hours leading up to a launch, because yay! Launch! But I might if that launch gets cancelled, or delayed, especially if those reasons are ones I don’t agree with, or think could have been addressed in advance. And if I was putting in long hours to show that I deserved something, or was ready for something, and I didn’t get it I might well resent that, too.
I’m acutely aware of the stats that say women are likely to drop out within the first 10 years, and for a while now I have been convinced that yes, I will be one of them (a non-techie friend was horrified by this stat, and pointed out that that is a shorter career than a professional footballer). So sometimes I feel like, time is limited, put career first, and other times I consider that when the end does come, I’ll need to have other things in my life or it will feel very empty.
The other thing, is when you make a big choice where you prioritise your career over your life, or vice versa (like when moving) is even when it’s on the whole a good decision, there will be days when something goes wrong and you doubt it. When you imagine the road not taken, and wonder. When your heart breaks all over again, for whatever it was that you gave up.
I think this is normal. This is the cost of an interesting life. The price of increased options is having to make (sometimes really hard!) choices between them. It’s the curse of knowing what is out there, and what you’re missing out on… and what you gave up.
I go to a startup event, and it’s interesting to hear non-technical people talking about developers like over-priced commodities.
L comes to me for advice, she’s contemplating her next move and worrying about whether or not she feels passion for the project.
C reads my blog, tells me that she can tell I’m passionate about writing from my writing. I say, “that doesn’t mean I want writing to be my job.”
R knows what she wants to prioritise with her career, but is hearing conflicting advice about what she should prioritise instead (and it sounds a lot like “passion”).
I loathe the word “passion”. I loathe it in relationships, where it seems to mean seeking out the movie style ending rather than the day to day. And I especially loathe it in career advice. I like the Study Hacks ethos – it’s not passion, it’s hard focus.
Entrepreneurs talk about passion. Cool. You probably have to be chasing something really hard to give up economic stability. That doesn’t mean it’s for everybody.
Passion is Blinding
To be passionate about something, means being unable to look at it rationally. This is unfortunate, because rationality is a very important part of building things well. Maybe it helps you stay awake for a week on a caffeine-fuelled coding binge. But it’s hard to love anything that much, for long.
Passion doesn’t help you prioritise, it asks you to do everything. Data and pragmatism help you to prioritise.
Passion doesn’t help you weigh up the eng-overhead and the data on usage of that feature and advocate for cutting it.
You are Not the Decider
There’s a reason why Product (PM) and Engineering are two separate roles. The PM looks at the big picture and the whole product and market (the what), the engineer owns how to build it (the how). It’s cool to have an opinion, but the PM is the decider on the what (this is fair! Engineers don’t like it when PMs try to be deciders on the how).
When you feel passionately about the what, but you disagree with your PM and they overrule you? That sucks. But that is their job.
You might think you know better, and maybe you have a really bad PM and that is true. But if you have a competent PM, they are going to make better decisions than you (on average) because that is how they spend their time.
Competition is Fierce
A friend was working on a super cool project, that she should totally have loved… but she didn’t. She should have been really happy… but she wasn’t. She was really stressed by the environment.
We talked about it, and I observed something along the lines that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to work on something like that, but that I really didn’t want to work with the people who really wanted to work on something like that.
Because a lot of people go looking for passion, and The New Shiny, the people who end up building The New Shiny are often the people who were willing to shove other people out of the way to get there. If you are happy to go about your work looking over your shoulder to see who might push you out of the way to get what they want, cool. I’m not.
You Live in the Details
It’s great to like the bigger thing that you are working on, but at the end of the day engineers mostly spend their time pushing pixels or protos. 1000 lines of test code does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about the product; it makes me feel confident about it’s stability. The menu bar might be part of some grand vision, but after a couple of days of just you and the menu bar, the vision seems pretty far away.
If Not Passion, Then What?
As a developer, passion is a distraction. For me, it’s not about passion for a product, it’s about having a healthy relationship with my job, a commitment to my career, and then maybe a general excitement about technology.
What does a healthy relationship look like?
I like what I’m working on, and I think people will be better off because it exists.
The people I work with treat me with respect.
My work does not have to encompass my entire life. I can maintain other interests.
Most importantly though, it’s good if you think that leadership can manage and ship a project of this scope (preferably, this should be based on evidence) and that you can manage and execute on the part of the project within your scope (again, it’s best if this is based on evidence).
I say with evidence because passion hides, rather than cures mismanagement. Passion is the advocate of scope creep, the delusion that sets in at the expense of prioritisation, the fuel of Dunning-Kruger, and the carrot that would have you work more hours, for less money, on something that is destined to fail.
Internships are often billed as a “3 month job interview”, but from the other side they are a 3 month stint in being a people manager, and the first opportunity people have to have a real impact on someone else’s career. This can be in a good way – the internship that makes the intern feel confident in their decision to be an engineer! The one where they built the Awesome Thing that helped them get that full time job.
Or, a negative impact. The Internship that was so bad that the intern left wracked with doubt about their capabilities. The poorly defined project that wasn’t actually possible, conclusively proved too late to do anything else meaningful. The manager who said that thing, that they won’t talk about but can’t forget either.
The job of a good manager (of an Intern, but maybe this applies more widely) is to set them up to succeed, and to define a space within which they can be effective. An internship should not be a test to overcome a poor manager and a badly-defined project. It should be a test to execute on a well-defined project with a supportive manager.
The Project
A good intern project is self contained whilst exposing the intern to multiple people. It will have significant impact, but isn’t on the critical path.
It can be hard to balance these things. Finding something nicely self-contained may mean you need to work harder to get your intern exposed to other people. Sometimes that means the project is more experimental, which means there is a risk it won’t actually ship.
I like to split off an initial project, that I estimate will take ~2 weeks. This gives the intern a chance to get to grips with the code base, and achieve something early that is significant enough that they can look back on that if they later feel discouraged. It’s also a time for me to gauge their competence, and make sure the main project is going to be the right one for them.
It’s also an opportunity to set the ground rules of how I want us to operate. One enormous CL (changelist) for a 2 week project is going to be a pain to review, one enormous CL for a semester-long project is just not going to happen. At this point I’ll meddle more so that I can back off later – train them to break down things into small pieces (students are used to submitting entire assignments and waiting weeks for feedback, so this can be an adjustment), and to ask for guidance as we go.
The intern is not there to fix little bugs for you, they are there to build something that demonstrates their employability. If they are so amazing that they can pick up bugs for you as well, and you can tell the story “operating like a full time engineer”, great. But they shouldn’t be doing things like that to the detriment of their project.
Communication
As with anyone, really, the best relationship with your Intern will be one where they feel they can come to you, and where they value your opinion. Where you can trust them. Where you are convinced of their capabilities, and they know you are, and that you are on their side and there to make things easier for them.
Because of the poor quality of management in the tech industry, a lot of people don’t have a good model of what a good manager looks like, and management anti-patterns beget other anti-patterns. The hands off manager begets the micromanager, for example.
Personally, I hate having scheduled meetings with people I sit next to (the emptier my calendar is, the happier I am). But I’ve realised that a meeting blocked out in my calendar is a visible sign of a commitment to make 30 minutes for them, every week.
However the weekly meeting is, in my opinion, the least important part of your communication. Eat lunch together, listen to their updates in the standup, give thoughtful and fair code reviews, ask their opinion on things. And when they do something good, tell them. When they do something really good, tell other people as well. Always give them credit for what they do.
Find ways to proactively discover if they are having issues. I like things broken down so that I’ll expect to see a CL every day so if I day goes by and I don’t see something from them, I’ll make a point to ask them how it’s going. If their standup update sounds like they are going in a different direction that I would have expected, I’ll ask some questions to figure out if I should be worried and intervene.
I read back through this and it sounds like it could be invasive and micro-managey. But micromanagement is when you are forced to account for your activities in a way that makes you resentful. Conversation often features people talking about what they are working on and how it’s going. Aim for conversational.
Female Interns: Other Considerations
When I was an intern, I worried I was the diversity hire. Years have passed, and I’ve worked in other countries and it appears… I am not alone. Male interns can create or just exacerbate this problem by making comments to that effect. It’s helpful to be aware of this, and look for opportunities to quash that fear. If they are a diversity hire, for example part of a program that offers internships to underrepresented groups, all the more reason to affirm their potential and capability.
There are guys who think it’s great to hire more women because they think this will improve their chances of getting a girlfriend, who gleefully exclaim “intern season” in the manner in which they might exclaim “girls gone wild”. Be mindful of any men in the office who do anything that could conceivably make a female intern feel uncomfortable. I’ll ask female interns (that I know! Not just randomly) “Is everyone being nice to you? Is anyone being… too… nice… to you?” because you can’t expect them to complain. Firstly, because they are on a 3 month job interview. Secondly, because girls are trained to be grateful for male attention, and to internalise it if it makes them feel uncomfortable. And to female interns everywhere: the guy who works full time at a company you are interning at and wants to date you, is not the kind of guy you want to date.
I know, I know, Dave’s a jerk to everyone and he always tears apart everyone’s first code review. But, don’t be a bystander. Be it casual undermining, or the intellectual pissing contest, don’t put up with it. Insist that other people be kind to your intern. Yes, the comment might be fair, but it would be phrased better if the writer thought first “this is a smart person who has thought about this problem”, and not “yet another idiot I am forced to work near”.
If you can’t cope with the first two conversations, reach out to a woman in the office (or outside!) and ask them to mentor your intern. If you can’t cope with the third, have your manager do it.
If you can’t cope with those alternatives, do your potential intern’s career a favour – have someone else mentor them instead.
I’m lucky to have a large and broad network, internally and externally. Well, I say lucky. I work at it. I stay in touch, ping people to say hi, schedule lunches, arrange to meet up when I’m in the area, or they are in the area, ask how they are doing, take an interest in their achievements and lives.
Here, I wrote about different kinds of people who give helpful career perspectives, and I assembled a list of mentor and mentee tips (thanks to some wonderful people for suggestions).
Friends
I include friends here because: your mentors are not your friends. They are not the people you unload all your crazy on. But, it’s really good for you to have someone to unload your crazy on, talk to, vent. Even better if these people will give you some perspective. If you leave work in tears, you need to have someone you can call.
It’s good to build your network outside of the office too, because there are things that it can be hard to talk to someone who works at the same company about without legal ramifications. For example, someone who is sexually harassed may want to process it before taking it to HR, or not take it to HR at all (article on the failings of HR in the tech industry) but if someone who works with them knows, they may be legally obliged to do something about it (I am not a lawyer, but I have been told this is the case in Australia and the US).
It’s helpful to have internal people to talk to, because they have company context, although your colleagues are not your friends either. But I’ve found having work friends I hang out with outside of work is really beneficial – there are things that are just too much of a pain to discuss otherwise: “I’m working on this project, which I can tell you nothing about, and this guy working on this other project, which I also cannot reveal any details of, and I clashed about the meaning of this company priority, which I have to keep to myself”.
One of my friends in Sydney, we would vent to each other, and that was fine, but when the vent was over we’d challenge each other to take a positive action. It was really helpful – these kind of friendships are golden.
Benefits:
Maximum context (the people you speak to most often, they’ll get the mostly irrelevant details you won’t bother other people with).
On your side.
Watch out for:
Especially if they are more senior to you, friend’s first, career advice second.
They may not want to give you “tough love”, and might tell you what you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear.
Dysfunctional friendship dynamics (e.g. being threatened by you succeeding).
Peer Mentoring
I have a peer mentoring group from a leadership course I took, we try and catch up roughly monthly, which is super helpful. This is the main place where I get the male perspective, as my network is pretty female-dominated.
There’s a certain amount of chit chat, but typically one or two of us have some pressing problem that they bring to the group to talk through and get some thoughts on. Pretty often we can make connections for one another, which is great.
Benefits:
Variety of perspectives.
Broadens network.
Watch out for:
May not always have the experience to give good advice.
Scheduling conflicts are hard.
Time management – one hour session, 6 people = 10 minutes each if you start on time.
Role Models
I have a mentor who has the job that is medium term goal – Staff Software Engineer, not a manager (regular readers may have gathered that I lack the tact or emotional capacity to be a manager). I try to catch up with her roughly monthly, although this can be hard with timezones and schedules.
She’s amazing, she was the mentor who gave me this advice about Confidence. In general, I talk to her in some amount of depth about what the 1-2 biggest immediate challenges I’m facing, and she gives me some insight, and some encouragement.
Benefits:
Inspiring: a relatable person, who career-wise is where I want to get but worry I won’t make it to. Getting to know her humanises her, makes it seem more possible.
Less close, she’s also more likely to notice longer term trends – that I seem more confident lately, for example.
Often overcame similar challenges, relatively recently.
Watch out for:
They are awesome because they have a lot going on – be prepared to do the work to schedule with them.
Time management: don’t ramble, give highlights.
Not all advice is right for you, it’s not a silver bullet.
Oracles
This is the far away mentor, like one of my mentors is just way beyond where I ever hope or expect to be. She is seriously amazing, and seriously successful. I catch up with her maybe quarterly, and I’m careful to be super respectful of her time (this quarter I know she’s extra busy and I’m pretty happy, so I will just send her a highlights email).
Her, I ask the high levels questions of and then use her answers to guide me for the next couple of months. So when I was deciding what to work on in London, I ran my decision by her, and got her thoughts on that and some general advice for things to do to when starting on a new team. At the end of last quarter, I talked to her about things I was focusing on over the next few months, and how to demonstrate I’m at the next level. I’ve also had really helpful conversations with her about things like how to deal with engineer arguments, casual undermining, being ignored etc. She’s great at cutting to the core of the problem and giving me a heuristic to use.
Benefits:
Career visionary (think like, Product Visionary) – great for the big picture.
Again, longer term trends. She was the first person to notice how much more confident I am since I moved, “I think you learned more last year than you realise… [key achievement], that took confidence”.
Can open other doors: get you into programs (this is how I got my other mentor).
Watch out for:
Very little time, make sure you plan in advance, no emergencies.
No time to understand your day to day, make questions strategic.
Can be too removed from where you are.
Don’t ask them for too much: time, favours, whatever.
Specialists
I’ve written before about my experiences with getting coaching for public speaking (1, 2) – this has been super helpful to me. A long time ago now, I also hired a professional to create my resume. Mentors give general advice, but sometimes we have a specific task that could benefit from specialist help. You can find that online, and you can find people who offer that as a service.
I think it’s often helpful to allocate money, not just goodwill to building your confidence and skills.
Aside from that, there are people in my network who encourage me just on certain axes. For example, a friend who pings me CFPs (thanks Chiuki!), and who recommended me to speak at a conference (2 of my 6 talks this year wouldn’t have happened without her).
You don’t have to have your One And Only Mentor, you can have different people you turn to for different aspects of your career. And some of them you my also pay.
Benefits:
More in-depth expertise on specific things.
Fresh perspective.
Watch out for:
Lots of people offering various kinds of coaching online, make sure you determine who is a good fit for you (personal recommendations are good, or the writers of blogs you love).
Whilst sometimes you can sign up to be mentored, that is not the case for sponsorship. Sponsors you have to find, and cultivate. Look to work more closely with the person who is most supportive of you, highlight your achievements to them (not in an annoying way), and if they do anything for you appreciate it. They used their reputation to help you, that is an amazing gift.
When I think about the difference in my job now, versus my job a year ago, sponsors made all the difference. It’s transformational.
Benefits:
Biggest career-impact.
Best way for women to get ahead.
Watch out for:
Resentment from peers.
Focus on bringing them your achievements, not your problems (if they are not also a mentor or friend).
Being A Mentor
I think the best way to get people to want to help you, is to demonstrate that you are the kind of person who pays it forward. I know that me writing a blog for example, and being open about my experiences, makes more people keen to help me.
Also, I wholeheartedly subscribe to Madeleine Albright’s “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
I think mentoring can be a formal thing, but it can also just be a relationships you build, where over time someone reaches out to you, and you reach back. Even in the case of the more formal relationship, the mentee needs to keep reaching out to build it. Someone doesn’t care about your wellbeing because they got allocated to you, they care about your wellbeing because they get to know you.
Sometimes people take a while to warm up, ask questions (I once thought that someone didn’t really need to talk to me at all, but the actual concern came up at about 20 minutes. She just needed more time).
When you can do more than mentor, sponsor (e.g. help find that intern her next project, promote their work).
When someone reaches out (e.g. friendly email, question buried within it) respond.
Ask questions that get mentee to address broader context and consequences.
Be open about failure; those stories are more useful than those of success.
Praise, showcase their achievements, be encouraging.
Being a good mentee:
Expect to be the person who reaches out, and schedules.
Don’t take it personally if they are busy.
Ask what frequency and format they prefer (Walking meeting? Times of day? I schedule as much as possible over lunch, because Efficiency).
Be respectful of their time.
Take notes! This will help you retain the conversation.
Come with concrete points to discuss. Get to them quickly.
Take anything with a grain of salt. The more senior you are, the more this is necessary (if you are super junior, the advice is easier and the situations are less unique than the junior person thinks they are).
Say thank-you. Send follow up notes if their advice was particularly helpful.
No blame if their advice sucked, you are responsible for what you do.
Don’t expect miracles. Mentors aren’t coaches. They can’t hold you accountable, only you can do that for yourself.
Look for ways where you can also be helpful (information, introductions).
If they do you a favour (e.g.introduction) follow up! Follow up on the favour, and let your mentor know that you did.
Don’t ask “will you be my mentor”, build a relationship based on shared interests, ask for specific advice. “I’d love to chat to you about X” is much lower key than asking for an ongoing relationship up front.
Both:
Be fully present in your interactions.
Show up on time.
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
.jpg)
.jpg)
