How to be a good mentor

I feel extremely fortunate to have had great mentors throughout my career. As I find myself in a position to mentor others, I constantly wonder what made my mentors great so I could learn to be a better mentor. Looking back it is interesting that my mentors have been from a variety of roles— engineers, engineering managers, designers, product managers. Having these people in my life has definitely helped broaden my perspective and give me multiple ways to think about the same problem which has definitely been useful. Without further ado, here are the things I learned from them on being a good mentor:

1. Be an excellent listener: This one should not come as a surprise to anyone but I want to start with this because this one skill amplifies the other aspects of being a good mentor. So what does being an excellent listener look like? There are a few aspects to this — (i) Embrace silence and let mentees take up as much space as they need in conversations. More often than not, the answers to their questions lie within them and in being able to express themselves freely, they will be able to hear their own words prompting a part of their brain to think more deeply and uncover insights that weren’t obvious earlier. Being able to solve more problems on their own is the ultimate end goal which makes this very important (Side note: If you always end your chats feeling like you wanted to say something but didn’t have time for it, it’s a strong sign that you are a fairly good listener. You can always write down your thoughts and share them later. On the other hand, if you constantly find yourself cutting someone off, then you have some work to do) (ii) Recall relevant information shared in past conversations and bring it up when relevant. For example, say that the mentee shared that one of their goals is to build their product skills in previous conversation. But if their next project does not involve that, check in to make sure that they are aware that this doesn’t seem aligned with their goals (sometimes there maybe a reason for it and it’s fine). This does two things — you play the valuable role of someone who is holding them accountable for making progress towards their goals and you also demonstrate that you care about them enough to recall personal details. Overall, being an excellent listener builds a lot of trust in the mentor-mentee relationship.
2. Balance asking questions and providing answers: A good mentor should be able to ask questions and help mentees find the answers themselves (this goes hand-in-hand with being an excellent listener). But a mentor should also be able to provide answers. This may seem counter to a lot of other advice which encourages mentors to ask more questions and providing fewer answers. So I want to share why providing answers isn’t a bad strategy and in which cases it’s useful. Providing answers can be useful in the following circumstances — (i) If the mentee is either unable to find the answers on their own or they are mentally not in a place to do it, then having the mentor’s experience to support them is helpful. This builds trust and will make the mentees approach the mentors more often in the future giving mentors chance to ask more questions to help grow them since finding answers to most questions by themselves is the ultimate end goal. (ii) Mentors can expose mentees to different ways to look at the same problem and by providing a lot of different answers to the same question and how they arrived. at them, they can help the mentee build more awareness of the options (and more importantly the frameworks) for solving the problem at hand. More often than not, the challenge is not in finding one right answer but in picking one from the choices available. So awareness of choices and how to go about picking one (trade-offs!) are valuable things that mentees can learn from mentors’ past experiences.
3. Normalize failure: Failure is something that affects all of us to varying degrees. By openly discussing their past failures, mentors can normalize it which makes it admit / talk about it. It also demonstrates that it’s ok to talk about mistakes openly, be vulnerable with one another and that no one is perfect :) Some of my most inspiring chats with my mentor have been (maybe counter-intuitively) when they were reflecting on their failures. The reason for this is simple — seeing someone you look up to make mistakes makes it easy for me to be ok with my own. When mentors normalize failure and talk about it openly, it teaches mentees about reflection, self-awareness and a mindset to keep going despite setbacks — all of them pretty valuable!
4. Be generous with feedback: Feedback is something we all want more of but don’t get enough of. Mentors have an important responsibility to provide valuable feedback (includes what they are doing well and how they could be having more impact). So what makes feedback valuable? For feedback to be valuable — it needs to be specific, timely and actionable. Here’s a couple of examples — (i) “Jack, I loved the email you sent yesterday (timely). Breaking it down into detailed bullet points made it easy to read (specific). Please keep doing this for other emails in the future! (actionable)” (ii) “Jack, I found your explanation about your project in the meeting today very confusing (specific, timely). It could have been easier to follow if you had stated the goal of the project at the beginning and then provided supporting details (actionable).” Since mentors have a lot of shared context (through the conversations) and are also invested in the success of the mentee, it is really important that feedback is an important part of the relationship. A lot of times I have found that mentors can ask the mentee for feedback which forces mentees to think about doing the same. Other strategies for regular feedback that I have seen work well — setting aside 5 min for feedback at the end of every meeting or a dedicated feedback sharing meeting every 3 months or so (this last one doesn’t fit our timeliness criteria but still forces you to think regularly which can surface things worth sharing).

The above ideas don’t fully represent what it takes to be a good mentor but they capture what I think are important and non-obvious. I hope to learn more about mentoring in the coming years both as mentee and mentor. Happy mentoring :)