My favourite thing about people management is building relationships with my direct reports and then one of my favourite aspects of relationship building is getting to know and understand each individual’s career goals and helping them grow and develop through mentorship.
I really enjoy working with mentees to understand their challenges and exploring their goals. I especially enjoy the mentoring sessions where I’m able to engage with the mentee(s) through more intensive, structured guidance, helping each individual gain understanding in their chosen areas of potential growth.
One of my main philosophies is direct empowerment, by this I mean that I actively try to empower those I work with by providing support and safe opportunities for growth. This is at the core of how I like to mentor people. I firmly believe that mentorship is different to teaching in that the mentee has to decide the topics to be covered and what their goals are. I always set expectations that this is the mentee’s opportunity and they need to drive their own agenda. As the mentor I may add structure and guidance to the plan but ultimately it should be the mentee who creates it.
Depending on the structure of the mentor - mentee relationship the style of the sessions I run will vary. If it’s one on one mentorship where the mentee and me work in different teams or organisations then I’ve found regular coffee catch up Q&A sessions work well. Whereas, if the mentee is in my team or we’re both able to dedicate more time then the sessions can become more structured. I’ve also conducted group mentorship through the IXDA to a group of six amazing and passionate UXers which was an inspiring experience that I hope the mentees found as rewarding as I did.
Where a more structured approach is possible, this is the style I much prefer as I feel I can be more effective and accelerate the mentee’s growth through structured practise. As a Kinesthetic learner I know that I struggle to learn by reading or listening, I have to do the do in order to learn and master something so I bring this approach to my mentorship. I first work with my mentee(s) to understand their goals and topics they’d like to cover. I then devise a series of interactive workshops designed to encourage them to practise the things they’re looking to master. These sessions are a mix of theoretical content, well documented best-practise, lots of questions and answers and always a practical aspect.
To illustrate how I facilitate hands on mentoring sessions, let’s walkthrough some sessions I recently ran on the topic of starting UX projects in the right way. In these sessions I was mentoring two of my team and together we worked through the following activities:
List out their problems
My mentees and I worked through the common problems they had faced when starting projects and the larger problems that then grew from these initial problems. Listing them out as we went.
Examined their current processes
We discussed their existing processes and explored why they started projects like they did.
Understand the why's
I challenged them on why they used the processes they do and where had they originated. It was during this conversation that we struck upon a major issue they both shared, up until this point in their careers they had only completed smallish projects so when they were challenged with a larger projects they still tackled them like a small project. This gave me a really strong platform to build on.
Revisit old problems seeking new solutions
We revisited our list of problems and for each we brainstormed a couple of questions they could have asked or activities which might have helped to mitigate the problems they experienced later in the project.
Discussed stakeholders and project starting points
We then re-examined our list of problems again but this time with the lens of select stakeholders. We explore what had been asked of them from their stakeholders in previous projects and questioned why the stakeholders had made those requests. We reviewed their previous projects and considered what they could have done differently, what activitives might have caused the stakeholders to act differently and again what questions they could ask to better understand their stakeholders' needs.
Build a framework to empower them
From the discussions we were able to collectively put together a very loose framework of questions to answer, activities to consider and strategies that could help them make quick, sustainable progress right at the start of a project and also build stakeholder trust.
Practise
We then role-played through some examples to help each mentee practise, make mistakes and ask questions in a safe environment.
The result of these few sessions was that the mentees were now much more confident about starting projects. I capitalised on this by setting each mentee a goal to use the framework in at least three projects or initiatives this quarter and provide feedback on how and where the framework can be improved.
If you'd like a copy of this google sheet, it's available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GcreiHC6SoEP_7AxM7yoXPNvvjQudXMSYYWBtQy5LI8/edit?usp=sharing
It is a bit basic and there's nothing ground breaking in there but it helped my mentees gain a bit of confidence and think more about how they plan their work at the start of projects rather than just getting stuck in.
Cover image by Arno Smit on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/sKJ7zSylUao
Contact
Jules Munford
Phone: 0431 414322
Email: julian.munford@googlemail.com
Twitter: @julesmunford
© Julian Munford 2020