Your Best Developers Need Mentoring

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about improving developers, I can’t help but notice that most resources and articles to help Engineering leaders and Project Managers just center around the idea that if your team is struggling or if you have a “weakest link” developer, you need to think about mentorship and improvement, or even replacement. These are common stories we hear about daily. Well I’d like to talk about a different angle to this that people rarely want to discuss. Maybe it’s not your worst developer that needs the most help. Maybe it’s your best one.

It’s a contrarian concept. As leaders we’re almost hard-wired to solve personnel problems by wanting to fix the weakest link. So let’s look outside of technology to see how other leaders think about team-wide improvement. In basketball, Michael Jordan and Lebron James famously received and receive more coaching than all the players whose names we don’t remember. In music, Michael Jackson famously rehearsed months on end prior to a major tour while other artists touring arenas of equal size would rehearse just weeks prior.

This isn’t just to make the greats greater. It’s because those greats (and the coaches and producers behind them) know that they are the biggest influence to the team at large. Getting better has higher stakes than just their personal reach. Think about it like a trickle-down diagram. If each developer on your team receives a large percentage of their output-quality cues from the leading performer on your team than fostering improvement of your best person is actually the highest-yield investment you can provide to your entire team!

Obviously if you have a major weak link, that needs to be addressed (hopefully with mentorship before termination, but we understand the need for both on occasion), but if everything is running fairly smoothly and your team is clearly taking a lot of cues from the biggest gun you have, it’s time to push that person to level themselves up as well as the image the rest of your team looks to. At Codementor we pride ourselves on having a diverse range of options in terms of mentors, including mentors at the highest level (Silicon Valley CTO’s, creators of massive open source projects, etc.). We realized that mentorship isn’t just for that beginning developer or that mid-level person. But even at the highest-level we need to be able to make great people greater.

So next time you’re ready to invest in your team, look to the top and not just to the bottom.

Not sure how you can push your top developer(s) to improve even more? Let’s talk, we’ve seen tons of companies go through the same thing. Get in touch at https://www.codementor.io/business !

Codementor is an on-demand training & mentorship platform for developers. Check us out at https://www.codementor.io/business