week 11: mentoring

The big thing on my mind today is mentoring. At work, they want everyone to have a mentor of some kind. The corollary of that means that there's a good chance you also have a mentee.

I have one. He's been around for a couple months and just left for the training center this past weekend. The experience, which is ongoing, has made me realize (again) how high my expectations for others usually are. I have to be very deliberate in my efforts to relate to new people. And before you get going thinking that you know what the difficulty is, you might want to think again. It's not that I cannot place myself into the shoes of a new person again and recall what it was like to be new. I was pretty new not that long ago and I remember how odd the entire business struck me at first. I remember what my questions, which now seem so self-evident, were. And I did it without any real assigned mentor because mine had quit a couple weeks before my arrival.

The difficulty is not in recalling what it was like to be new and relating on that level. The difficulty is that I expect other people to catch on as quickly as I do. I expect them to pay attention to the details and ask the right questions. And just what are the right questions? They are the ones that I would ask if I was them. If I am going to work closely with someone and be largely responsible for assisting them, then I expect them to keep up. However, most people don't pay attention to details, see the greater picture, and efficiently, almost ruthlessly, comprehend the 'why' of a situation. So many times I have at some level tutored or taught or mentored someone in something. And almost every time, I have found it difficult to slow down and explain what seem like natural steps to me but are often logical leaps to others (hence the parenthetical 'again' earlier). I'm getting better at it and this time around, the relatively long-term nature of this mentor/mentee relationship is helping me understand how unlike me most people are.

At the level I am at, the mentoring in the company is largely to assist new field engineers and basically develop a replacement for oneself. The most important part of the mentor/mentee relationship is to develop a successor. For starters, it creates someone who can take over for you one day when you go on to bigger and better things. The alternative is to be stuck doing what you're doing forever. Plus, that ability to cultivate others is an invaluable for managers and any company should know that. It might seem great to make yourself indispensable, but that's about the worst thing you can do to yourself. Well, unless you like being a big fish in a small pond and perversely enjoy the power that the dependency of others for you creates. Then yeah, go for it. However, if you want to move on, then you need to develop a replacement. Our legacy doesn't lie in hanging around forever like some invaluable institution, a cache of location-specific knowledge. It lies in improving the overall processes of the job, making it more efficient for the company and for the next person who takes it.