Just over a year ago now, I did this thing I called “mobile mentoring”. If you were under-indexed in tech and worked on mobile I would do a call with you about anything you wanted.
I spoke to maybe… ten people? Most of them – in the way of mentoring – I never heard from again. I have no idea if our conversation helped them, or if it didn’t.
It’s a privilege to help someone like that. To turn around and give someone a couple of small things – that I was lucky enough to get myself earlier in my career – and see it make a difference. He would have succeeded without my help, I have no doubt about that. Hopefully, I made it a little faster, a little easier. Hopefully, one day he’ll pay it forward to someone else.
So I’m opening this up again. If you’re under-indexed* in tech and work in mobile, I’ll do a call with you about anything you want. I’m limiting this to 2 a month, at 45 minutes. Email ariel@accidentallyincode.com and tell her a little bit about who you are and what you would like to talk about, and some general times that work for you.
If these criteria do not apply to you, include a receipt showing you made a donation (of at least 100 USD) to BlackGirlsCode and you can buy your way in.
* under-indexed: a member of a group that has been historically under-represented in tech. I like this phrasing because it positions it as people not being found, rather than not showing up, HT to my good friend @duretti for teaching it to me.
I hate mentoring and I don’t want to do it. This is mainly a product of me hating three things.
One-directional relationships.
Other people’s priorities not my own.
Giving advice.
One-directional relationships are so exhausting, because you can’t really be open. Being a manager has – oh the irony – made me less open to mentoring people not on my team, because those kind of relationships are inherently unbalanced, and the kind of energy I have for that goes to engineers who report to me. There’s not really much left for other people. But in general I don’t like to have unbalanced relationships. I don’t like people to ask me for things, that I can’t ask for in return. I don’t like people to expect stuff from me that they don’t offer. This makes me a great person to be friends with. And a really reluctant mentor.
I hate mentoring in much the same way I hate email. Because it’s something that arrives that you have to deal with (or not) and it’s driven by other people, not by what I want to do. Because it’s an appointment on my calendar to prioritise someone else and I already have too many of those.
I hate giving advice, and I particularly hate giving advice without context. It’s a lot of work to get that context. For instance, if I give someone on my team advice, it’s typically something I’ve spent ~2 weeks observing and thinking about. Contrast mentoring, if I spent an hour talking to someone and as a result was able to give them one useful piece of information, that would actually be good. But it’s very low ROI on an hour of my time.
This assumes that a would-be mentee has an actual problem that I can help with which is far from a given. We need to stop selling people – women – this idea of mentoring as the answer to navigating a career. A mentor is not a therapist. Or a coach. They cannot replace your shitty manager or even really mitigate the damage he does. They cannot help you with the psychological consequences of going home every day in tears. They cannot give you certainty in a situation where there is none.
I totally understand being in a situation where you just need to talk, but this is not a job for your “mentor”, it’s a job for your friend or a paid professional. A friend is much more likely to call you on your shit than a mentor. Your mentor, if they conclude you’re not actually going to do anything other than complain on the regular is liable to ghost.
For mentoring to be actually useful, you need to know who you are and what you want. You need to have met your core needs (therapy! I can’t recommend it enough!) and then you can ask specific questions and get actual helpful information in return. Or even better, practical help.
As part of our Technically Speaking Anniversary, we ran a mentoring program. If you’d told me a year ago that we would be running a mentoring program as part of this I would have been shocked, because we had explicitly gone in this direction of scaling up the mentoring we did, and moving away from 1:1. But it was clear from the emails we get, and the tweets we see, and the questions asked in our webinars that, especially for people who have never got on stage before, sometimes what people really need is a bit of 1:1 help.
That being said, a lot of mentoring programs fail. They fail publicly, by going nowhere. And they fail silently, e.g. women report being over-mentored and under-sponsored. Mentoring gets offered as this panacea, like you just get a mentor and everything will be fine. This is completely wrong. Getting a mentor is the least of it (I wrote a bit about why).
The way we tried to deal with that was simple: Expectations. Expectations. Expectations.
Mentors
A note first on how we found out mentors – we reached out to people with varying degrees of speaking experience, mostly who we knew. We deliberately did not ask the “usual suspects” commonly found in any mentoring program that has some aspect of “diversity”. We also did not publish the names of our mentors, but encouraged them to share what they were comfortable with.
The main reason for this was that we wanted people to focus on what topics they wanted help from rather than who might help them.
First, we set expectations with our mentors.
Sessions would be 1-hour.
Asking for preparation is encouraged.
No obligation for follow up.
We asked for minimum 2 and maximum 4 (it’s a lot easier to ask for 2-4 hours of someone’s time than to ask them to enter into an indefinite relationship with a stranger).
Initial email to mentors:
Thank you so much for agreeing to be a mentor as part of our anniversary celebration! We super appreciate it.
We want this to be the most efficient use of your time possible. Please feel free to ask your mentee to do some preparation, and highlight what aspects you are most comfortable helping with.
We’ve set expectations as one 1-hour mentoring session. If you want to follow up that’s great! But there is no expectation that you will do more than one session for each person.
We still have some slots available so if you want to share the anniversary with your network and mention that you are mentoring that would be awesome!
Finally – we’d love to send you a Technically Speaking tshirt as a thank you. If you pick out what you want and let us know an address, we will get one sent your way. If you’d prefer something else, we’d love to buy you a book! Some of my recent faves: Gravitas, Hot Seat, Slack, Women Don’t Ask, Why Not Me, or let me know if there’s anything you’ve been meaning to buy. I need to know whether you’d prefer a Kindle version or a Real Book (and if so what address to send it to).
Thanks again!
Cate
Mentees
Most importantly, we set expectations with mentees.
The mentoring form explicitly asked people what they wanted to get out of the session.
These two things were helpful to us in assigning mentors. They also encouraged people to think and be concrete about what they wanted to achieve.
Email to mentees:
Hi! Thanks for taking part in the Technically Speaking Anniversary!
You’re receiving this email because you signed up to get a 1 hour mentoring session. Following this email will be another connecting you to your mentor. Meanwhile here are some guidelines we’d like you to keep in mind.
Remember your mentor is giving up their time to help you! Be respectful of their time:
Show up on time.
Follow up with a thank you note if their advice helped (e.g. when you get a CfP acceptance).
Please reply to the intro email with some background on you and your speaking goals. Try to be as succinct as possible.
If your mentor asks you to do some preparation, please make sure it’s done well in advance of your call.
You will get the most out of mentoring if you have concrete questions and specific things you want to work on. E.g.
Turning an outline into a good abstract.
Putting together an outline for a talk about <specific subject>.
Choosing what to talk about from a range of topics.
We still have some slots available so if you want to share the anniversary with your network and mention that you are taking part that would be awesome!
Cate
Matching
We matched people based on their experience and goals, and the expertise of the mentors. Some were really clear and obvious matches, and others less so. We also considered timezones, but chose what seemed like a better mentor-mentee pair rather than convenience. E.g. Someone focused on giving their first talk would be paired with a mentor who had become a regular conference speaker relatively recently. Someone who was thinking about how to get paid to speak would get one of our most experienced mentors. We also tried to connect people who worked on similar platforms where possible, especially when the mentee was thinking about things like branching out to international events.
Intro email:
<Mentee, mentor is>
<Mentor, mentee> participated in our anniversary and suggested that they would most like to work on <XXX>
<Mentor> please respond to this email with some times you have available and your communication preferences.
<Mentee> please respond to this email with a short explanation of your speaking experiences and what you want to work on.
Best,
Cate
(Notice again we are clarifying expectations: Mentee will accomodate the mentor’s availability, and be clear in what they are hoping to achieve).
A Note on Thank Yous
In the initial mentor email we offered to send all mentors a small gift. Firstly, being able to do that kind of thing is part of why we started having sponsorship for the newsletter. But also this is circular – if money goes through whatever it is you run, some of that should be allocated to thank people who volunteer to help you.
Secondly, it’s amazing to me how many programs that rely on volunteer effort come across as entitled to and unappreciative of those volunteers. If people are giving up their time to help you, that needs to be appreciated. The time to do that needs to be factored in to the overhead of the program. We (with a little help) opted to surprise and delight people where possible (this part is ongoing).
Learnings
Running a mentoring program is a lot of work.
… especially if you do work as an organiser that makes life easier for mentors: e.g. getting people’s goals out of them.
Expectations are important. We needed to be clear about them in even more places – e.g.what does a good goal look like?
Template emails help a lot.
Having a collaborator that keeps you honest is gold. E.g. Chiu-Ki and I both reviewed people’s goals and requests and pushed each other to do the right thing by our mentors rather than the easy thing for us.
Surprises
We basically have no idea who subscribes to our newsletter. We estimate >50% women, in part because a lot of people think it’s for women even though it’s for everyone – we just consider women as first class consumers of the content.
We more mentoring requests from Europe than expected, so more mentors based in Europe would have been really helpful.
We also had about >25% of mentoring requests from men. This was initially surprising to me, but actually I think makes sense – there are so many “mentoring” programs (of dubious effectiveness) for women, but Technically Speaking is for everyone because everyone is afraid of public speaking.
Support
One way to support what we do is sponsor Technically Speaking. Sponsoring an issue is currently 250 USD, webinars start at 500 USD.
Let me start by saying: I hate giving advice and I try not to do it. Typically my “advice” falls under two categories (in that order, often deployed together):
Telling people that whatever their reaction (stress, sadness, fear…) is understandable.
Suggesting books or lines of thinking that I have found helpful in related situations.
Of course the urge to give advice can be overwhelming and sometimes I find myself breaking my own rules. One of my friends was so overwhelmed recently that having had a small degree of success with strategy 1 I found myself telling her what to do. And then I apologised profusely. But at least she told me afterwards it was helpful.
The thing I really hate about advice, though, is that often people don’t need advice as much as practical help. I would prefer to offer someone practical help than advice, and failing that I buy people books.
That being said – I have a handful of friends who I started interacting with because they came to me for advice. There are people who did this so well they turned me into a mentor, and then a friend. I am fascinated by people who succeed at this approach, because I tend to go the other way. I become friends with people, and then periodically I will ask them a question. Normally just the one. Because I don’t want to impose.
But these people stand out because they are the exception, not the norm. Sometimes I get requests that just sit in my inbox for weeks because I don’t know how – or just plain don’t want to – respond to them.
One thing I’ve taken to doing this year is replying to these requests and explaining that I am never going to get to their request along with some feedback about how they made it. No-one has yet replied to one of these emails, but I like to think that offering concrete feedback on requests is probably more helpful in the long term than some half-hearted and resentful attempt at the request itself.
So what does a bad request look like?
Large or undefined in size – a vague “help me with X”, or a long email where I need to decipher the question.
Requires research – asking for something that is not a core expertise. Memorably someone wanted me to watch a (long) video in order to understand their project.
Impersonal, generic – it’s not clear why they are asking me, or it’s clear they are only asking me because I used to work for $brandName company.
Inconsiderate – the best example here is one a friend gave me, people who ask her to travel across town to meet them because they are “too busy” to come to her.
Entitled – this comes up most frequently when someone who I barely knew or haven’t spoken to in a long time jumps in like we spoke in the last month. Bonus: they introduce me to someone without consent.
Of course no-one goes into these things thinking they are making a Bad Request. And I’ve procrastinated writing this blogpost because I don’t want to seem like a monster, and I don’t want the people who send ~good (we all have off days, including me) requests to feel bad about it.
Note to people I know: if I reply to your emails, we’re good. If you have my phone number, we’re BFFs.
So what makes good requests different?
Concrete – they ask for a specific thing.
Concise – it’s a short email, distilling the essence of the problem.
Small – it’s manageable, doesn’t require me to look stuff up they could easily find using their favourite search engine.
Personalised – they have done their research on me and their request builds on things that I have written / blogged / tweeted about.
Builds a connection – they find a commonality and use it to connect us.
Contextual – they consider the context of what’s going on with me. One, this is a great way to open the email. Two, it’s a way to figure out when to send the email.
Followed up – they let me know what happened! Periodic updates regardless of whether or not someone wants something is even better.
Appreciated – there are a number of ways to show someone appreciation. Supporting projects, sharing work, or recommendations. There’s one person who was an absolute pro in turning me into her mentor, and her friend. My favourite thing that she does? She sends me books. Books that aren’t the kind of things I usually read, but that I end up loving.
The word “mentor” gets thrown about like it’s a magical pancea. The original meaning, from Greek, is “wise advisor”. The question of mentoring is not is it good (it is), or how do you find one (anywhere), but how to you get someone to want to be your wise advisor? And the answer, I think, is that you make it very easy and worthwhile for them to do so.
Which is a simple answer, but a lot of work. The thing is though, the people who do that work, are the most worth helping. Because as in so many things, the advice? That’s the least of it. Advice is easy. Execution is hard.
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.
Yesterday Sacha Chua put up a blogpost entitled “What can I help you learn? Looking for mentees“. I’d been following her blog for a while now, and got out of the lurking stage and started commenting periodically, so of course I was like, “me me me!”.
If you don’t read Sacha’s blog, go and grab the RSS – you can take your pic of categories too, which is neat. I should work out how to do that! In the meantime you can subscribe to separate categories by going to that page and clicking on the RSS icon in your navigation bar (where the URL is), here’s the one for visualization.
But I digress, Sacha was really nice in her response and has already left loads of great comments and insights in comments on my blog. I’m looking forward to learning even more from her than I have been already.
Credit: flikr / kelvin_luffs
And now I have three mentors! Two of them even know it, as well.
Tammy – I worked with and although we didn’t quite understand each other in the beginning, she thought I didn’t adore the Mall of America and was joking about going off to China to kick-box when we were done, she went from my boss to my friend. She’s super inspirational (she works three jobs and is still lovely, and still creative) and she (somehow) finds the time to take an interest in what I’m doing and cheer me on.
Treena – I met at Democamp, neither of us realized the other was British from our accents (I think we both think we talk normally) and she took me in search of PG Tips. Treena gives me great advice like, “Schedule at 80% of Capacity” (yes, she is a physicist – how could you tell?) and helped me clarify why I don’t want to do a PhD. She blogs here.
Sacha – as I mentioned above, I’ve been following her blog after finding it from one of her shy connector presentations. OK, I’m not that shy, but I do get intimidated by large groups of people and these presentations have some great tips. She’s also International (from the Philippines) and, I think, a programmer who speaks fluent human, which is what I want to be, too.
Yes, I’m super lucky to have encountered these people but I think they key is to be open to the possibility that you can learn from people, stay in touch, listen, give what you can in return. Some people are (genuinely!) so nice that they just enjoy feeling that they’re helping.
Sacha’s invitation for “mentees”, is really cool, I think. Indicating that you’re open and want to help invites people to interact with you. Who knows how long I would have continued lurking / commenting periodically if she hadn’t.
So I’d like to pass it on: if there’s anything you feel I could help you with, topics you’d like me to blog about more, slide-decks I could make (particularly about Java, and Processing but I might also do some stuff on Haskell and Functional Programming) – tell me!
I check my stats every day, I know you guys are here – but I guess many of you are still in the lurking phase. Talk to me! It would make my day, and if I could help you out at all, I’d be even happier.
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