What's your approach to mentoring and coaching your team?

My approach will depend on the person and situation. At a higher level, I liked to keep in mind that I can: coach, mentor and sponsor. Jess Mink articulates very well what each of them mean on her post New Manager Resources. On my day to day, I’m often switching between coaching and mentoring. While I’m coaching or mentoring someone, I remind them that I’m sharing my past experiences and what has worked for me, and let them know that my experiences are not the only way to approach a situation or challenge, and I have an open dialogue with them. An important part of my role is to practice Sponsorship effectively. Also, as I become aware of…

With coaching managers and coaching people, in general, I like to do a couple of things. I like to keep a tracker that we work on together. The tracker is, essentially, ”What are your focus areas for this month?” Then we say, ”Okay, this month, there are these four or five competencies. Which one of these are you focused on the most? Is it people management? Is it OKRs, (objectives and key results)? Is it technical expertise?” Whatever it is, we just track the time and energy that’s being put into it.

All right. One more question here, more immediate question, is what is your approach to mentoring and coaching members of your team? Have you often worked with career development for example?

> …when people ask me what’s my management style I say – coaching. I do believe that coaching is a much better approach than anything else.

I believe that everyone owns their career. They know best how they’d like to grow, and in what areas. I am there to provide feedback and an outside perspective. With that said, I always do my best to provide growth and learning opportunities, but it’s up to the team members to seize them.

To make sure we are making progress one everyone’s goals, I like to keep track of them in the 1:1 notes I have with team members and revisit them periodically.

I believe coaching is about filling gaps. The style depends on the person, but for most people I have a strong relationship with, I focus on keeping an open conversation going and making sure members feel safe sharing the areas they are struggling with. I like to encourage my team to come up with ideas to do things better on their own.

All right. I try to stay away from mentorship unless explicitly requested. My team, for example, is almost half … almost half of my team are not men and I think mentorship in that scenario where I haven’t lived their experiences gets a little bit tricky. I’m a little bit more fan of sponsorship. Giving them tools, giving them opportunities, giving them … and when explicitly requested advice, then advice. Or feedback. But I’m more of a fan of throwing people into the deep end of the pool and making sure that they won’t drown.

I try my best to listen more than I talk. Too much of our day is spent doing things we THINK people need, instead of actually listening to them. In all of my 1:1s, I make sure to ask 2 questions: What is on your mind? What can I help with this week? These will help you get to the point quickly and not waste time talking about unimportant things. However, I do also dedicate at least a couple minutes to ask about personal things – how was their weekend? Do they have any fun trips planned? Trust is everything when leading people. Without trust, coaching and mentoring can’t exist.

That’s again, a great question, Vidal. One of those specific examples I’ll take is how do I groom or mentor an individual under me to take more of manager responsibilities, and how did she actually grow to become a manager now? And this is a fascinating real-life experience that I went with her because she expressed interest that she wanted to become a manager. I want to develop her to start taking some of those managerial responsibilities. So the first thing I did was to set up the right ecosystem for her to succeed. Right? And that comes with understanding that person’s behavior towards other people and how does she approach a specific…

There’s a very good book that I would recommend on this front called “Radical Candor”, written by Kim Scott. With regards to coaching and mentorship, one thing that immediately comes to my mind is to be completely direct and straightforward. Especially with my reports, I think the best gift we could give them is candid, real-time feedback.

I focus on asking a lot of questions (ideally: good questions) and channel a lot of my natural curiosity into mentoring and coaching – I work with lots of people around me who are tremendous leaders and bring lots of experience, and asking good questions also helps me learn from and about them. The better I understand where they’re at and what they need, the better are the questions I can ask to help them develop paths forward. I found “The Coaching Habit” by Michael Bungay Stanier a great primer on coaching, and often refer back to it.

So, primarily by example. The way I think about it is the best mentorship and coaching happens when there are two important elements to it. One, it has to be contextual. There has to be this understanding of what is the context in which this person is attempting to develop. So what is the organization doing? What is it that they’re attempting to accomplish? Being able to observe them on an almost day-to-day basis about how they’re going about it to form, first, an opinion about what it is that they can improve on. But, then, also be able to talk to them on a regular basis about it just to make sure you’re calibrated to the challenges that…

Good question. I think we touched a little bit about it earlier. There’s no silver bullet around that and I think what’s been important to me is just to be aware of that and to develop a relationship with every person I work with that’s a good fit with their personality and with the things that are more challenging for them. And so what I try to do is figure out what level of support people need, what type of support and different people will have very different needs. Some people need help with technical challenges that they have. Others need help with cheerleading and telling them that they’re doing a great job and that they should keep…

The one important thing you need to realize as a coach and mentor is that one size does not fit all. What works in coaching one person on your team, may not work for another, due to different personalities, background and our own unique strengths and weaknesses. That means I cannot replicate the path that I took and encourage others to do the same – it may not work for them. Some people have very strong technical skills, others have strong interpersonal skills – and depending on these differences, they need a different approach to develop. We all have different goals as well. When coaching someone, I try to understand what their long-term…

This will vary a bit from person-to-person and also based on role and level. My overarching philosophy is always to provide timely feedback. When something comes up I try to jump on a call or into a meeting with that individual and provide them feedback right away.

One thing I think is the biggest weight, like the best lever to unlock potential in people, is to understand what drives them. And everyone’s a little bit different. So much \[crosstalk 00:19:49\].

Sure. The first thing that I do is I schedule regular meetings with my team. I let them individually determine the length of time and the frequency. Most people, I schedule regular weekly meetings. The reason I do that is …

One-on-one, regular, yeah.

It does take a considerable amount of time, but I think that the investment is worth it. The individual then once they establish, “Okay, I want to have 30 minutes once a week,” then they have to bring the agenda. We’ll talk about what is concerning to them, what are the things that are top of mind for them and just asking questions.

To expect more out of myself than I do out of my team. If I can’t show that I’m becoming a better human on this big planet, a more productive manager, a more successful coach, then who am I to be trying to cultivate this in others? This means a lot of self-reflection, being vulnerable with my team members, and sharing my progress.

When I interact with members of my team, I’m always experimenting with new things that I’ve learned about. If anything, it keeps things fresh for all parties.

Absolutely. I always tell everyone I’m mentoring or coaching that you have to be the CEO of your own career. And, what that means is…

…you actively…you have to actively manage your own career. Whether you’re in a startup or a big organization, it’s up to you to manage your career path. For example, if you want to join a new role, you should ask your VP where fits an organizations priorities and where it will lead. At every review, you have to check in and you have to make sure you’re clearly able to articulate your goals and how you’ve achieve them.

I mentor and coach obviously the folks that are reporting into me and then I do skip levels with all the other managers in my team, there are about 11 other managers and I ask them to pick a development area specifically they want to focus on with me, meaning something I can mentor and coach them on. And sometimes it’s business strategy, sometimes it’s time management, it could be anything.

I approach supporting members of the team based on their familiarity with the topic. For members who are making a change in their career track or exploring a new skill, I like to mentor them. Sometimes, I help them identify the right mentor. When I mentor someone, I share my experiences and advise them of choices with their pros & cons. For members that are quite familiar with the topic but are struggling to improve, I rely on coaching them by telling less and asking more. I ask a lot of probing questions and help them to identify a path to take and choices to make.

Coaching and mentoring depend on an individual needs. I usually mentor junior engineers on the team as they need direction in their career. With more senior engineers, I put my coaching hat on and want to empower them to come up with solutions and own their career progression.

I think I can sum it up in two sentences. . . If you don’t know something, please ask. It’s ok to make mistake once or twice, but if you keep making them then I am going to question either your ability to perform or your ability to follow guidance.

My fundamental question every day is: For each person, what is the next challenge?

I have to approach the question both from the person’s point of view, e.g. are they ready for it, if not, how will they be ready for it? as well as the organization’s point of view – Does the project have enough clarity? Has the project been green-lighted by leadership? Are other teams in the right spot to make this project successful?, etc.

Let me first start by saying that for me personally, mentoring and coaching are not one in the same thing. Mentoring comes from trust and it’s a long term relationship that you build and develop or like I have employees who are still remained in touch with me after 17 years and we have a mutual trust and respect. Then we share costs and ideas and that’s where the mentoring function goes. Coaching on the other end is like guiding individuals and helping them through those difficult situations, what they are doing, it could be a project, it could be a communication issue between the two individuals. That’s where the coaching comes in a heat of…