Mentoring is one of the ways I like to sow into the technical community. I feel like the community is much more about the individuals in it than the masses. Plus, it’s efficient – I can put my own time into things, but if I help other people develop a love for the community and start sowing in too, it can quickly become significant.
Deborah Melkin (@dgmelkin.bsky.social) invites the T-SQL Tuesday community to write about mentorship/sponsorship this month. One of the things she prompts us about is around how we make mentoring relationships work. So…
To me, mentorship comes in a few different styles. Sometimes it’s relatively formal, and people block out my time on a regular basis. But other times, I’m just there for people when they need. This second type is often more commonplace, and is a style of mentoring that I think everyone should try to provide. It might not start off feeling like mentoring, and you might feel unqualified to be a mentor-proper, but if someone is coming to you now and then for advice, the relationship has probably become a mentoring one whether it’s acknowledged or not.
When it’s more obviously a mentoring relationship, with scheduled meetings, the mentee having particular goals they’re trying to reach, I find the it’s important to develop the trust and safety – thing that are often already in place in that ‘second-style’ where the mentee reaches out for help. It’s not always hard in the more formal setups – I’ve had some great experiences with this over the years – but it’s important not to neglect that. A relationship based on trust and safety is often key to success in mentoring. The mentor should genuinely want the best for the mentee, and the mentee needs to be able to trust the mentor with their hopes and fears. And there must be safety on both sides, because neither side can be appropriately open if the safety is not there.
(There are certainly times when mentoring can work effectively without the mentor genuinely wanting the best for the mentee. But in my experience they tend to be focused on technical matters and narrow in scope.)
I’ve seen times when mentoring relationships stop being safe, and it’s not good – typically leading to a breakdown of the mentorship. Sometimes it’s when the mentee grows quickly and the mentor becomes jealous of their trajectory. Sometimes it’s because the mentee disappoints the mentor and resentment creeps in. Sometimes the mentor has trouble understanding a situation and the mentee feels exasperated. Or maybe the mentor breaks confidence and the trust is shattered. It’s very easy for mentoring to break down for a bunch of reasons, but when that trust and safety are missing I think it’s inevitable.
There are people I mentor in various ways. I’m not going to list them here, because of that trust thing. Some people appear in my calendar from time to time. Some send me a message when they want to work through something. It could be a technical matter or it could personal, about their career, their spiritual walk, their comedy, or their relationships, but they choose to reach out because of our relationship. I’m not always the right person to offer advice, but I can always offer a compassionate ear. Even if I don’t feel like the expert they need, when I ask them questions about the situation, they often reach inside and find they know the answers already.
When I consider it true mentoring, it’s because I’m not just listening and asking questions, but I’m challenging them with things. I’m asking questions not only to help me understand their perspective, but also to get them to see other perspectives. Seeing situations through other people’s eyes is often a way to build compassion and grow in general.
Because that’s what mentoring is all about. It’s about helping people grow into more of what they can become. We should all want that for the people in our lives. They grow, the community grows, and everyone wins.
@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)
