Leadership Hacks: Mentorship

Context: I have been managing teams for 8 years now, first at IBM and now at Facebook. Recently I found myself having repeating conversations on showing up as leaders and that 'leadership' is not something one should be intimidated by. Watching my own two boys grow and many other kids around me, I strongly believe all of us have innate leadership abilities as kids. We probably un-learn them over years or do not flex those muscles enough over extended periods. So I am writing this series reflecting on what I have framed as simple practices or hacks.. over the years to build your leadership muscles! Here is hack no. 2: Mentorship

Hack #2. Mentorship

TL;DR: Mentorship is important. Being a good mentor is a path to being a better leader. It does not have to be complicated or intimidating. Start by being a champion of your colleagues. Practice prioritizing time for others. Think long term life goals and provide actionable advice and remember you are getting coached too!

A mentor in its most simple form is a trusted advisor and guide. Even if you don't obviously think of yourself as a mentor, i'd conjecture you've probably already exhibited this behavior.

Start as a cheerleader: There is a good chance you already are. The foundation of this behavior can set in early in your career as an individual contributor. As a young engineer and IC, I found myself looking up to people who talked about other peoples work more than their own. And I tried to emulate them. As I gained more experience and came across peers, who had potential but were not given the right roles or recognition I would be a fierce advocate for them. Whether it meant amplifying their contribution, shining light on them, helping create new opportunities, advocating for promotions or advising them on difficult conversations. This brought me a lot of joy. Mostly, I was being a cheerleader and champion for them. Eventually some of those relationships evolved to more formally a mentor-mentee relationship. If you are wondering where to start, start with the colleagues around you. Recognize potential of people, recognize behaviors. Be an advocate for them especially in their absence.

Train yourself to prioritize others: Like it or not, corporate assessment frameworks can unwittingly drive people to be very ratings driven. It drives performance, but you are constantly chasing ratings, promotion, claim to fame and so on. I did! And I also brought that into my leadership role. When I was first offered a management job, a former manager asked me "what is your most important priority in the new manager job?". I went down the rabbit hole of traditional performance metrics: success of my project, department, company, and as I kept rambling, he paused mid-way.."Anshu - stop. This was a trick question! none of what you just described matters... your number one priority as a manager becomes the success and well-being of your reports". I am forever grateful for this early course correction in my thinking. It was still hard to un-train myself. Focused on personal accomplishments, I was not stepping on things my employees needed to be doing instead. More importantly I was taking away from a finite pool of time, best spent working on the career and growth of my employees. I wish I understood mentoring better then. It is the tool that teaches you how to prioritize others, to carve out time for them. Not just meeting time, but time spent making active connections for mentee, thinking about their success, and being their champion. If you have two minutes to watch..here is a splendid articulation of this by Simon Sinek (my favorite leadership coach) in context of leadership traits!

If you have a choice, mentor the one who may need it more: I have observed that large organizations confuse mentorship programs with talent development programs. They essentially find top performers and "high potential" employees, and provide them more mentoring from the top leaders and executives to accelerate their growth. This is a classic rich gets richer problem. Nothing wrong with it, its talent development 101, but don't call it mentorship. If you want to be a good mentor, try not to pick the winning horses. I am glad that most programs I have seen around mentorship at facebook stay away from this 'rich gets richer' syndrome, and instead focus on meaningful pairing, diversity and inclusion. But my broader point through this note is, why even wait for a program? Just start.

Don't force fit the relationship. Let mentees be in control: Ideally, when you are in a large organization, constantly interacting with people, you don't have to formally look for mentees or mentors. You talk to people, give them your time, and if it is mutually rewarding, you repeat it and over a period the relationship evolves (just like any other). When you are new in an organization, you might want to proactively reach out seeking mentors, or mentees, but over a period as you practice this more, it should become an involuntary muscle. Once introduced, make sure you let the mentee drive the cadence. That way if they are not comfortable with the relationship, or they don't find much value in it or the bandwidth for it, they can safely walk away.

Take the 'manager' out: If you are a manager, you are trained to assess and evaluate employees, but as a mentor you need to relax that muscle. The last thing a mentee needs is another management review of their performance, goals, or OKRs around the mentoring relationship itself. In many ways, a mentor is a friend. Friends don't judge, they reason. Friends also don't assess the impact of friendship through OKRs. Understand goals, but don't make them a barometer of the relationship. If your mentee prefers to define and measure goals, embrace it.

Think long term, life goals: Most of my early mentors talked about the next promotion, the next role and how they could help me. I found myself doing the same with my early mentees until the day I met the mentor who told me "Anshu.. Let's not talk about the next level, lets not even talk about IBM.. Let's talk about what you want to do.. in life, what motivates you?". It was a moment of epiphany. I had never been asked that question by either mentors or managers. And now.. almost all my mentoring and career discussions begin with that question. (Most of us don't have a definite answer to the life question, but the point is to go deep on what drives your mentee beyond their day job. Another way I ask this is in terms of what are their career day dreams). So, when understanding aspirations of your mentees, don't index on short term goals or the next promotion. Talk to them about where in life they want to get to, in the long term. What motivates them, what detracts them, and how you could shape their current experiences to help them achieve the long term goals.

Advise through examples: Instead of just giving abstract advice, try to advise through examples intersecting with the day job and goals of the mentee. For e.g. if you are talking about how to influence, then find a short term project on which the mentee needs to influence people, and work through this challenge together with them. If you are advising them on writing or presentation skills, then review and help prepare a real presentation with them. Some mentees might be looking for advice on completely different aspects, like how to be a working parent and manage the stress, or just looking for a safe space to share their insecurities or concerns. Thats where listening skills come in handy too.

You are the mentor, and the mentee: Oh and btw you gain a lot from mentorship. The mentor is a mentee too. You gain life long friendships based on trust and mutual respect. Roles reverse, and you will find yourself seeking counsel and mentorship of the very people you mentor. In fact Simon Sinek articulates it very well in this short video where he rejects the notion of a Mentor-mentee relationship and calls them all a Mentor-Mentor relationship.

When it comes to mentorship and coaching, you will find a treasure trove of lessons in this book about Bill Campbell: Trillion dollar coach of silicon valley. When I was reading through his stories and principles, I had the remarkable realization that the managers and mentors I truly connected with through my life are the ones who inherently embodied one or more of those principles.