The chapter describes what you should expect from a good manager.
1-1s allow human connection. Letting your manager into your life is important, because when there are stressful things happening, it will be easier to ask for time off. Your manager should treat you like a human that has a life outside work.
An opportunity to speak privetely. 1-1s shoud be predictably scheduled so that you could plan the agenda.
Delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something. The sooner you know about your bad habits, the sooner they are to correct.
Praise should be public and criticism should be private. Praising in public is considered to be a best practice because it shows what positive behavior looks like.
A manager holds some responsibility for finding resources for career growth. Mostly you are responsible for figuring out what types of training you want. If the company has a promoution process, your manager will be involved in it in some fashion.
Knowing yourself is step one. Step two is going after what you want. When you want to work on a project, ask. When you are persistently unhappy, speak out. You will not get everything you want, and asking is not fun, but it's the fastest way forward.
A manager's job is to do the best thing for the company and the team, not to do whatever it takes to make you happy. The only person you can change is yourself. Your manager expect you to bring solutions, not problems.
Consider not only the job, the company and the pay, but also the manager when evaluating job opportunities. Strong managers have strong networks, and they can get you jobs even after you stop working for them.
It's an opportunity to learn in a safe way about the job of management, and the feeling of being responsible for another person.
You want him to love you as he will go to his friends and tell about you and the company he worked for.
You will have to have a project in mind, look for small features of your current project that would take a few days to complete and start from there.
Try to sit with him as much as possible the first days.
- Listen carefully. Listening is one of the basic skills for people management. Listening is the precursor of empathy, which is one of the core skills of a quality manager. When you mentee is speaking to you, pay attention to your behaviour. Listening goes beyond hearing words, people are not usually precise on what they mean. Let your mentee correct you.
- Communicate clearly. Communicate what needs to happen.
- Calibrate your response. During the first weeks of the internship, you'll learn the frequency you need to check in with your mentee to provide the right adjustments.
Your job as a new hire mentor consists of onboarding, helping this person adjust to life in the company effectively, and building your and his network of contacts in the company.
This is an opportunity for you to see the world of your company through fresh eyes.
Effective teams have good onboarding documents they provide to new hires.
The best mentoring relationships evolve naturally and in the context of larger work.
- When you are a mentor. Don't do it unless you think it will be rewarding for you and the person you're mentoring. Don't say yes and then fail to actually do the mentoring work.
- When you are a mentee. Think about what you want to get out of this relationship, and come prepared to your sessions. If you don't have time to prepare or you don't think preparing is necessary, ask yourself if mentoring is really something you need at all. Maybe instead you need a friend, or a therapist, or a coach.
The alpha geek is driven to be the best engineer on the team, to always have the right answer, and to be the person who solves all the hard problems. He values intelligence and technical skill above all other traits. Can't deal with dissent. He has all the answers. The alpha geek tries to create a culture of excellence, but ends up creating a culture of fear.
The alpha geek believes that every developer should know exactly what he knows, and if you don't know something, he will point out your ignorance. He can be very rigid about how things should be done and closed off to new ideas that he didn't come up with.
If you have ever wondered why people don't seem to come to you for help despite your clearly strong technical skills, ask yourself whether you're showing some signs of being an alpha geek.
Mentoring can be a great opportunity to break out of that habit. Practicing the art of teaching can help us learn how to nurture and coach, how to phrase things so that others will listen, instead of just shouting them down.
Alpha geeks make absolutely terrible managers. Better off to give them a focus on technical strategies and system design.
What you measure, you improve. You help your team succeed by creating clear, focused, measurable goals. Figure out what you're hoping to achieve then find the person who can help meet those goals. If your company is setting up mentoring programs, make sure that there is some guidance and structure.
Recognise that the mentor productivity will slow down during the mentoring period. Look for someone that you believe can succeed who wants to distinguish himself beyond his coding ability.
Skills that address emotional needs of people and teams. Because the outcome can be difficult to quantify is often dismissed as less important. Mentors need to be recognised, should be treated as first-class citizens.
Best mentors are going to be people who are further along in their mastery of the job skills that the mentee is trying to develop.
Use this opportunity to reward and train future leaders of your team.
- Be curious and open-minded. When we close our minds and stop learning, we start to lose the most valuable skill for maintaining and growing a successful technical career. Working with new people who are learning things for the first time can shed light on hidden patterns and help you make connections you may not otherwise have made.
- Listen and speak their language. Mentoring forces you to hone your communication skills. You must be able to listen and communicate in a way that the person can understand. Teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.
- Make connections. Your career ultimately succeeds or fails on the strength of your network. Mentoring is a great way to build this network. Your career is long and the tech world can be very small, so treat the other person well.