Mentorship is one of the greatest pillars of being a leader in engineering, but it is also easy to push to the side. It gives you opportunities to learn yourself and bring someone up and watch them succeed.

A few key components in my mentorship philosophy are:

1. Mentoring is a privilege.
2. Learn from your mentee.
3. Availability is key.
4. Lead don’t tell.
5. Be humble.

Mentoring is a privilege

Mentorship is an opportunity that not all engineers have the opportunity to do. As a leader within your space, you have a chance to help lift up those around you. This not only helps the individual that you are working with, but it also lifts up the whole team.

The saddest thing that I hear when mentoring someone new, is the horror story of how previous mentors have treated them. A common statement that I hear is, “It felt like I was inconveniencing them when I reached out.”. As someone that has and still does participate as a mentee, that is the worst feeling you can get. It deflates the mentee’s motivation to ask questions and it cuts yourself short of the benefits of being a mentor. Being in a position that someone wants to learn from you is a privilege that not all engineers are able to achieve, and that attitude will quickly diminish that view.

I know there is a sub group that is seeing the word “privilege” and question that because it requires resources that you might not feel like you have to mentor someone, but mentorship is not a one way street. Mentoring someone is an opportunity to grow yourself as well.

Learn from your mentee

Listening to the questions that your mentee is asking and finding good answers to them is a great way to learn yourself. The questions asked by your mentee can help provide insight into gaps in your documentation or where you possibly have gaps in team knowledge sharing. Taking this back and building up that documentation or finding better ways to share information then helps build the bridge for the next person coming through.

Your mentee is more than likely going to ask questions on topics that you either are rusty with or have not looked into before. Depending on where the mentee is with their growth, you can approach this two ways. First, you can take that question and do research yourself to provide an answer to them. The other option is to inform your mentee that you haven’t worked with that in a while and see if they can do that research. In either approach, it is useful to do at least some digging yourself so that you can fact check, but allowing your mentee to do that research and share it can be a valuable learning tool.

Everyone thinks about issues differently. As an experienced engineer, there is information that you are likely to take as a baseline with approaching a problem. By listening to the thought process of your mentee while they work, you can help break down your viewpoint and apply some of those approaches to your own problem solving.

Availability is Key

In my opinion, the most important aspect of being a mentor is making yourself available. If you have a mentee reach out to you with questions, you should be able to give them a response within a reasonable amount of time. Depending on your role and the level of your mentee, there should be an understanding of what reasonable entails, but if you leave that mentee hanging for a day, that is a day that whatever project that they are working on is now delayed. This builds on itself when you take into account that those questions might lead to additional questions. If your mentee feels like you aren’t reliably available, it will break down the trust required to be a proper mentor. They might hesitate to reach out and instead keep themselves stuck on a problem longer than they should.

To be clear, I’m not saying that any time your mentee messages you that you should drop everything you are doing to help them. Letting them work through a problem on their own and dig into things will help them be a better engineer. Giving them some time to formulate their question and what things they have tried, ultimately gives you the ability to better answer and gauge where they are in their learning path.

Lead don’t tell

Ultimately your goal is to have your mentee become more and more self-sufficient. That growth relies on learning how to think through problems, where to go to learn information, and other skills that doing the task will help them learn. You can quickly answer a question by giving the answer directly, and getting your mentee on their way. This is usually the simplest option to clear up your time, but this also doesn’t really provide what your mentee needs. Instead, you want to help lead them to finding the answer on their own. This can appear in many ways.

One option is leading questions where you break down the problem and help them see how you would approach the topic through the questions you would normally ask yourself. This gives them insight into your thought process and also gives them a framework of breaking down the problem into pieces.

Another approach might be to point them to similar problems that they can pull ideas from. This could be showing them a snippet of code that has a possible approach that can be modified or another piece of work that someone else has done where they can dig into those details and look at how that was tackled.

Be Humble

A final reminder and something that I find really helps open your mentee up is making sure to be humble. For me, this can be showing my mentee when I am spinning on a problem myself. Asking them if they want to dig into the issue together, can be a great way to break imposter syndrome for a mentee to know their mentor also gets stuck. Ultimately, we are still human and engineers; we don’t have all the answers, so it isn’t useful to act like we do.

Having a humble air makes you more approachable and gives your mentee an understanding that you are not going to judge them for their questions. Your goal is to help them learn and you were in their shoes at some point. Remind them that everyone is always learning, let them know you have mentors yourself, or find another way to show that improving yourself is a process we are all going through.

Remember to always stay learning!