On Being The Mentor I Wish I Had!

Be the mentor you wish you had growing up.

Long years ago, I was put in a situation where my team was just getting started at a contact center job. For unfortunate reasons, they (myself included) had no direct on-the-job support to offer on-the-job support and learning to improve performance.

That sucked.

My thought process back then was to build a knowledge hub that answers their questions. Started initiating calls and conversations during my working & non-work hours to collect and offer that knowledge to my team. I even remember re-attending the training (which I took before) on my weekends with a new batch, to recap on things I did not fully understand. My numbers took a hit but it was a team-saver long-run.

Doing this helped my team, I was so proud of the action, not the KPIs or any recognition. In my mind, I had the ability to respond; the response-ability!

Fast forward past that job, I needed my mentor and had none, so after working with my best knowledge and decision-making, it later seemed to help people experiencing something I experienced maybe more than once.

My motive wasn't clear at some point so I did a little internal digging and understood that yes, it was coming from this:

Being the mentor I needed made sense, and felt in line with my desire to offer my absolute best to my mentees as if I'm delivering this to my younger self. In an alternative universe. Where I'm entirely in their position. This is "being out there"

But things were a little different than I expected as I proceeded.

There were plenty of cognitive errors and biases to overcome to refine my advice, this one here is most relevant. The Survivorship Bias. Let's personalize it as "The Survivor Bias"

I often thought, wow, so much content about asking people to share the one secret to their success. Great. But beyond talking about its legitimacy or validity, let's fish for the bias.

See, if you ask a successful VP of Sales about how they made it to somewhere successful; they will answer with something, whatever it is, that they still practice or it made a difference at a point in that VP's career life.

That advice worked because the VP probably lacked it before, sure. But it's not the only thing they did to succeed. This complements what they already had and gives it synergy and more impact.

For our example, imagine this VP answered: "Well, my secret is to be more chill, less stressed about achieving the sales, doing hurried aggressive follow-ups all the time that backfire, and more believing and having confidence, faith, and patience... etc."

What survivor bias says here:

This person added a relaxed, believing mindset to what they already had. Which, assuming from the imaginary context here, it was the contrast to being goal-focused, ambitious, and aggressive to win. The addition balanced THEIR scales.

Which means:

That advice is just a later-added ingredient, not the whole recipe!

It's important to notice HOW you're phrasing your advice to people, sure.

It's crucial, however, to embody the mentee's perspective, reality, and unique situation. All in all.

Even if it's extremely similar to my case. Mentorship taught me that an "extremely similar" scenario is still not identical. Even identical means different decisions going forward because they're not me, not seeking what I seek, not headed where I went and going.

What triggered writing this article was an interesting piece of input from my recent mentees. It's that "I understood their situation quickly." Previously it was about that I asked the right questions. Now it's different.

My realization to share here is the approach!

As a recipient of a story being told, in series, movies, conversations, etc.

You are sitting where you are, and a picture is being drawn in your mind, to engage and include you, to draw the scene and scenario so you can relate. As this progresses, and as curious as you are; you get questions.

Except, in a pre-written story the questions are usually tackled as the story goes on.

In a mentorship scenario, the questions need to be asked because you seek a complete picture. This is your brain's default pattern-recognition superpower in play.

So instead of assuming parts of the story, or filling in the gaps... Ask!

When you do, you are re-building the story with your mentee, once you see better you can both think better!

Even your intuition gets engaged and thinks of better things, better guesses to what could happen next based on what you're seeing.

It's only when the picture is fully drawn to you that you can interact as a viewer, and give your input, opinion, perspective, and even feedback.

You do that after the end of what you watch or read, it applies perfectly here and you learn more!

Thank you for reading.

I'm Karim Wanny