This book is primarily written for technical subject matter experts. Think about that term for a little bit. Subject matter expert. Perhaps you feel it is overused. Maybe you wear the title with pride. Either way, you likely are one and the designation comes with responsibility. You worked hard to get the technical knowledge and skills you possess, but you did not get them alone. Even the greatest inventors only discovered a new or better way to do something. They did not create something out of nothing. Now it is your turn to help others. Perhaps that will come in a formal training setting, but it may also happen through mentoring a new or more junior employee. This is not a task to take lightly.
The need for technical experts to share their knowledge is greater today than it ever has been. There are many books and articles written that highlight and even dramatize the pending doom if the aging workforce doesn’t more adequately educate the new workforce generation. Statisticians track the number of engineering and technical diploma graduates as a way of measuring the technical health of a society. But those in charge of the technical knowledge of a company have the added concern of something harder to quantify: experience.
Most people like the concept of mentoring. Even if they don’t, most would fear some sort of social backlash if they vocalized their disdain for being a thoughtful and caring human. What fewer have taken the time to consider is why mentoring matters. The truth is, unless you are specifically charged with developing new talent, your concern is less with why you should educate new talent and more with how can you do it. Beyond the aging workforce argument, however, there are at least two benefits (or whys) to consider that will directly affect how you transfer your knowledge to other internal employees.
The first thing to consider is why it matters to you, the potential mentor. There are two good reasons to become a mentoring expert. The first is because experts who mentor other employees are more valuable to their organizations. The second is because mentoring experts are more fulfilled in their roles and in the legacy they will leave behind.
Experts who can help others learn more are very valuable to technology companies. As computers improve our ability to forecast and companies learn from past mistakes, the gem of a teaching or mentoring expert is becoming more obvious. Companies value teamwork and some even reward their engineering teams based on their ability to improve as a team, not as individuals. There are four main reasons why this is truer now than ever:
Of course, each of those reasons has a potentially negative downside:
When you consider the positive reasons for mentoring, it seems that these four things combined would compel any ambitious company to require their senior experts to mentor new employees. When you consider the negative reasons, you understand why many do not!
The truth is that mentoring is most helpful when it is seen as a partnership. Senior employees need to learn from new employees almost as much as the vice versa. What they learn may be very different, but the healthiest companies create opportunities for the learning to happen in both directions.
Success is more than just completing a task or obtaining financial security. True success includes a sense of fulfillment and investment in what matters most—people. By this definition, the most successful experts are those who freely share the knowledge they’ve been lucky enough to gain. Their success comes because they are trusted, both by the company and by their fellow employees. Said differently, trusted experts are teaching experts.
Of course, there are experts who will not mentor or share their knowledge. They hoard information as if they have done something superhuman to deserve and own it. They may do fine in their job. They may make a decent living. They may even force the company to pay them more for the knowledge they won’t share. But one thing they will never be is trusted.
Trusted experts are more likely to survive product failures and economic downturns. In fact, they are the ones companies turn to as an advisor when difficulties arrive. Good salespeople know that to be successful they must be able to gain the trust of their clients. While their focus is on external customers, the same is true of internal relationships. Only those who are willing to share the knowledge they have gained that has contributed to their success and that of the business will be able to influence other people. If you want to leave behind a legacy, it is best to leave it in people, not a product.
Mentoring is not just a benevolence that companies use to demonstrate their support for mankind. It isn’t a “good neighbor” program they are willing to lose money on in order to promote their brand or image. It really matters. It really makes a difference.
One of the goals of talent development specialists is to help employees take ownership and satisfaction in the value of their given job. Everyone wants their job to be meaningful. Employees who feel like their input is minimal or nonexistent are less likely to get engaged. One of the fastest ways to get their input is through a mentoring relationship.
Allowing a new or junior employee to work alongside an experienced expert to accomplish tasks that they otherwise would not be able to undertake is one of the quickest ways to advance an employee from entry level to peak performance. The tasks must be well defined and appropriate, but the experience is invaluable.
Mentored employees have the opportunity to gain more experience sooner and that experience will be more meaningful. In a well‐designed mentoring program, all employees have at least four distinct types of tasks they could face on the job:
Not all mentoring is equal. In order to get the most out of it, at least in regard to product proficiency, a mentoring program must be intentionally designed. Three emphases will help to make product mentoring more effective. First, use as many mentors as feasible. Second, make the experience real and valuable. Third, make the mentoring a partnership, in which both parties are expected to take away some learning.
Some good mentorship programs pair one employee up with another for a long period of time. These programs work well when the intent is broad in perspective and deep in potential. It works well for transferring soft or undefined skills. With product training, however, it can often be more helpful to observe and learn from multiple mentors. These activities are not a training class; they are an opportunity to make a difference by supporting multiple people. Different people will need different types of assistance, and the more exposure one gets the better.
The emphasis here is on the word real. No matter how much effort we put into a training class to make it seem real, it isn’t. But at some point, the tasks they execute on your product will be very real, indeed. No one wants a doctor to perform surgery who hasn’t assisted in the same surgery multiple times. The idea is to blur the line between “first times.” Everyone has a first time. They should have two—the time they first observed another professional doing it and the time they first did it themselves. Those events may be well defined and specified legally or otherwise. Experientially, however, that is usually not the case. The multiple experiences of performing that task with another professional should make it difficult to define when the “second” first time happened.
All those involved in the program can learn from it. No one is exempt. In order to make this a partnership, both sides need to grow from the experience. Experienced experts can learn from future experts. Young talent is more likely to trust mature talent when they are treated with respect. One of the best ways for a senior employee to show respect for a new employee is to admit, and even detail, what they have learned from them. When a senior expert shares what he or she has learned with other team members, there is almost always a boost in trust and respect, two things that help keep a team together. When teams trust and respect each other, they will not hoard information or knowledge from their teammates.
Formal classroom teaching isn’t the best way for every expert to transfer their knowledge to their peers. As such, it is important to provide a way for everyone to become a teaching expert and gain the trust of their company and colleagues, even if the teaching is informal and on the job. Informal does not mean unstructured. The companies that profit the most from mentoring are companies that provide some structure for doing so to their employees.
Like any good program, your mentoring efforts require a good plan. A corporate‐wide plan should probably be initiated, led, and monitored by the talent development organization. If you are preparing to lead a corporate‐wide mentoring strategy or even a program that expands beyond your immediate team, ask your human resources team for assistance. They may have someone who can help lead a program like this and relieve you or your department of the administration work that may be involved. This is especially important if involvement will affect an employee’s required development or go on their permanent records.
However, some technical groups or individual managers may want to create a plan for their smaller group. The following are some things to consider if you want to help other experts share the product knowledge and experience they have with their peers.
Some individuals may choose to incorporate mentoring into their individual development as well. Any plan may require approval from the supervisors of both the mentor and the mentoree. But authorization to proceed will not guarantee success. You need more than that. You need to get the endorsement and support from senior management in your organization in order for your program to have continued success.
Before you seek the support of management, get as much input as possible regarding how much time you can and should allocate to both mentoring and being mentored. List the experts you or your team can learn from and then solicit their help. List specific tasks that can be completed by a mentoree. Find examples that provide the exposure you want. The more organized and deliberate the information you provide is, the more likely you are to get the full backing of management. The more input and feedback program designers get, the more effective the program will be.
Define what success looks like for the program in general. Start simple. Set realistic expectations for how much time must be invested by both parties. Document how you will measure success and how often you will reevaluate the program. Don’t force mentoring for the sake of having a program. Start with a few champions and, as much as possible, let the program grow voluntarily.
The goal is to create regular interactions that are long enough to be meaningful and short enough that they don’t significantly interfere with either employee’s level 1 tasks. New employees may have higher mentoree goals than veteran employees. Even more senior‐level employees can benefit from a program like this, though you may choose to call it something different to eliminate seniority or hierarchy concerns.
There are generally two different approaches to creating mentoring objectives. One is to seek out specific tasks to learn and assign partnerships accordingly. The other is to allow the tasks to come naturally in a job‐shadowing environment. Both are important. Either way, each mentoring partnership should have some clearly defined objectives for the individuals involved.
When the objective is specific, pair less qualified individuals with more experienced individuals who will be involved in that particular competency in a real environment. Define the product experience the new talent should obtain. List the types of experience or knowledge you want the senior talent to demonstrate. Ask the mentor to act as a guide to develop the new talent. They should also provide feedback on progress and be the final word on whether the new employee can accomplish the task.
When the objective is to gain broader knowledge of the industry, a customer, or your own company, it may be appropriate to allow a new employee to shadow an experienced employee in their daily job. This is also a good technique when the tasks cannot be dictated, as in, for example, a technical support environment. In these cases, the objective may be an amount of time, or until a senior expert deems the learning to be sufficient.
Just as it is never wise to ask an expert to teach a class without helping them become a better instructor, so it is unwise to expect anyone to be a good mentor without first defining what that means for them. There are two things that are required for anyone to be a successful mentor. The first is aptitude and the second is attitude.
The fact that any person becoming a mentor must be proficient at the task they are expected to teach may seem obvious. Too often it is assumed. Never pair a junior employee with a senior one without first taking into consideration the specific skills that need to be transferred. Not all senior employees are good at everything, and not all junior ones need to improve everything. All employees have something they are adept at. The challenge may be to determine what it is.
Aptitude, however, goes beyond the technical, product, or soft skill abilities of an individual. Good mentors must also be good at mentoring. In order to become a good mentor, subject matter experts need to have their role clearly defined. Product experts must understand that showing a mentoree how to do something is not enough. Effective mentoring is similar to coaching. It becomes a two‐way dialog. Mentors must encourage and provide candid but constructive feedback in the same way a sports coach might help an athlete perfect a particular skill. To do so on the job with your product, expert mentors must allow the learner to perform specific tasks. In this way, the learning will become real and practical.
They also need to learn the tendencies experts have when conveying technical facts. They need to understand that they likely operate in the fourth level of competency and will need to remember what it was like to learn the material and go back to the third level of competency in order to teach. Refer to Chapter 3 for more information.
Mentors should also understand how the four principles of learner‐readiness apply to mentoring (see Chapter 4). If necessary, the mentor must help the new employee understand the value of the learning they are going to get (recognize the need). They must help the student take ownership and responsibility of their learning. A good mentor will relate the present learning to any experiences their mentoree may have had, and they will look for opportunities for the pupil to apply it as soon as possible.
A program leader could use the first part of this book to help mentors get a better understanding of how adults learn. Whatever you use, set the expectations and give the appropriate help to ensure success.
It is almost always a bad idea to force a subject matter expert into becoming a mentor. Most successful programs are volunteer programs. If the desire to be a mentor isn’t there, the likelihood of success is minimal.
Lack of desire may be due to several reasons. Some employees may feel threatened by such a program. Others may have had negative experiences that have created a bias against mentoring. Still others may simply see it as a waste of time, forgetting the importance of experience in their own learning history.
Because these adverse attitudes may exist, it is important to address them before launching a program. If necessary, create incentives and reward good examples. Remove obstacles and reduce the workload of potential mentors, so that mentoring is not an extra burden they are not prepared to bear. Employees will change their attitudes if they understand the true value of the program for the mentor and if it is feasible for them to do so without feeling overworked.
Mentoring programs work because they allow adults to learn in the way that is the most natural and the most effective—by doing. It gives new employees an opportunity to slowly and informally absorb learning from a more experienced expert, one who may or may not be a great classroom teacher. It provides an excellent opportunity for knowledge to become practice and for lab experience to become real‐world experience.
To make the most of a mentoring program, get as many experts involved as possible. Pair new employees up with as many experienced employees as feasible. Provide the structure and support required for success and take notes of what works and what doesn’t. No two mentoring programs will look exactly alike. Industries, technologies, products, cultures (both corporate and regional), and many other factors will alter the precise way you use mentoring as a program. What doesn’t change is the value of allowing experience to create more experience. When that happens, it won’t be long before the new employee is the one doing the mentoring.
Mentoring can be rewarding to a seasoned expert and be valuable to a company, especially a technology company.
Review of Part Five: The Operation of Hands‐On Learning