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When we start to think about the idea of self-development and broadening our horizons, we often look for new studies, courses, and certificates. It's nothing unusual, but what about just establishing a valuable relationship with an inspiring person? Having a mentor — not a teacher, coach, or external consultant — can be a good step if you need support in your personal growth.
Since mentoring at Monterail has been going smoothly for a few years now, we decided to share our approach to it and tell you a little bit more about how it works. I'll also show you the benefits that it can bring for both parties and how it can go beyond the company - you'll get to know the story of Dare IT mentorship.
Mentoring vs. Coaching vs. Leadership
The final shape of any relationship will, of course, depend on the individuals — first of all on their personalities and then on their arrangements and purpose of mentoring. It can be a mix of different theoretical approaches. The two that are the most often confused and have something in common are mentoring and coaching. However, it's good to be aware of the basic principles that distinguish them.
Who?
Most often, mentoring assumes a relationship between a person less and more experienced in a given professional area, while coaching bases on a less hierarchical relationship with a more partner-like treatment. The coach usually needs to have some psychological background rather than expert knowledge in a given topic or experience in your industry like a mentor. Therefore, the mentor can look at your entire career path and professional development in a broader time horizon, and sometimes — let you discover or fulfill your potential.
What?
Cooperation with a coach is mostly short-term and leads to the solution of a specific task or achievement of a certain goal, while a mentoring relationship is often long-term and assumes almost continuous development, or observing the career path in a wider perspective. A mentoring process is not only about doing an important movement and a transition from 'here' (the place where you are) to 'there' (the place you want to be). The way is the goal. And during this journey, a mentee can get real/valuable rewards — realizing their vision and plans, improving their performance, developing many different skills, both core skills and some related to the job.
How?
For all of this to happen, being relationship-oriented is crucial in mentoring. Without trust and, above all, listening (mutual) with empathy, it would be difficult to build a relationship where knowledge and learning can be truly shared.
On the other hand, when we think about coaching, this professional friendship is not so common, and the whole relationship is more focused on performance & tasks. If you are struggling with a difficult situation or have some big professional challenge, but you lack specific skills or you just want to work on your motivation and mindset to deal better with these situations, then coaching might be the better option.
Mentoring (vector image) by pch.vector
How We Approach Mentoring in Monterail
The beginnings of mentoring in Monterail date back to 2015, when there arose a need to better rethink and structure the organizational chart as the whole team began to grow. Bearing in mind the values that are key to us, e.g. knowledge-sharing and caring, a new way of treating relations in the company has emerged. At first, only developers were a part of this mentoring experiment, but then this approach extended to other teams in the company — project managers, designers, account managers, marketing specialists, and so on.
The Role of a Mentor
There are two people involved in the concept - a Mentor and a Mentee. It is important to understand from the beginning that the whole concept is for Mentees, not Leaders. A Leader should take the role of attendant and never manage or judge a Mentee during their relationship. A leader's responsibility is mostly to help Mentees in their career path and be the first option when they need to ask for advice. Let's dive a little more into the scope of a leader's responsibilities.
Relationship
- Being the contact person for mentees in matters regarding their professional development, personal well-being in the company and everyday issues they may face
- Conducting regular 1to1s with mentees
- Building an atmosphere of mutual trust between Leader and Mentee
Guidance
- Overseeing the on-boarding process of new joiners during their notice period
- Being in constant touch with a mentee by regular and ad-hoc check-ins
- Ensuring that everything is going well and they have all the necessary tools
- Being a guide for the mentee on any company-related matters
Performance and development
- Supporting mentee’s progress by helping in setting a development plan, advising on next steps/potential ways of improvement
- Gathering feedback from team members and conducting peer reviews
- Taking ownership of performance improvement plans
Personal well-being
- Ensuring a mentee feels good in the company and take necessary actions if they don’t
- Supporting mentees in case they are not satisfied with the job
- Helping mentees resolve any personal conflicts with other team members
Mentor vs Tech Lead
When it comes to mentoring in a firm, you may ask: is a mentor the same as a project manager or tech lead? Not exactly. We distinguish a position and a given role — so you can be an expert at the senior level and at the same time a mentor for less experienced developers, but it is not obligatory or necessary. Nevertheless, the basic principles of a mentoring relationship are the same: each person (mentee) has a leader (mentor) who can just help and base on their own experience and knowledge.
HR Business Partner
"It is worth emphasizing that each mentor works closely with a dedicated HR Business Partner. Together, we have regular 1on1s focused on updates on the mentees and discussing leaders' needs in terms of mentoring knowledge. The HR Partner also supports leaders with operational work e.g. feedback forms and with managing any difficult mentees' situations."
The People Team prepares for the new mentor an introduction composed of three elements. First of all, this person has to become more aware of their role and start to feel more responsible for others and the whole company. His/her decisions and behaviors will be observed by mentees (and sometimes even by new joiners), so this person should get a wider perspective and remember about values important for the company.
Secondly, the new mentor learns how to conduct meetings, how to give and receive feedback, how to propose solutions when a mentee struggles with some difficulties (tips not answers), and how to help in their self-development. And last but not least, the mentor is responsible for some organizational issues as well, e.g. preparing and coordinating the process of collecting peer reviews about their mentee."
How to become a mentor? You can get such a proposal from the People team or just apply yourself. It's all because we give each person the opportunity to develop in many fields, depending on their potential, possibilities, and, above all, their willingness.
Mentoring In Practice
Julia Szablewska
Project Manager
- What do you enjoy the most as a mentor? How does mentoring improve your self-development?
Being a mentor gives me a great perspective of getting to know amazing people and sharing knowledge with them on a daily basis. I really enjoy seeing how my mentees handle various project cases in such different ways than I did or I would ever do.
Mentorship also has a huge positive impact on my self-development as it brings a lot of "why?" questions to the methods I use working as a project manager. It’s such a refreshing experience and it helps me avoid falling into the trap of doing things the same way all over again. It requires constant improvements to my working methods and also helps a lot in working out better practices for our organization.
- What's challenging about mentoring?
From my personal experience, the most challenging part of being a mentor is learning how to actively listen to the other side - also putting myself into someone else’s shoes, and seeing the problems from their perspective. It is also impossible to separate the person from his/her very own life experience, so learning that growth has a different meaning to all of us has taught me the importance of empathy. It’s a very humbling, beautiful experience that not only enriched my knowledge as a specialist but above all helped me to grow as a human being.
Wojciech Stępniak
Ruby Developer, Software Engineer
- What do you enjoy the most as a mentor?
I like to share tips and advice with my mentees based on my developer experience, it usually leads to many interesting discussions. But what I really enjoy is watching their career progress and seeing how satisfied they are with their work in Monterail.
- What's challenging about mentoring?
Each of my mentees has a different career experience and personality. It is a kind of challenge for me to find the right approach to discussing proper topics with my mentees in an effective and comfortable way. I know that each mentee will expect something different from our relationship.
- How mentoring improves your self-development (what it teaches you)?
From my perspective, it helps a lot in improving soft skills, especially communication skills.
DareIT Mentoring Program
Mentorship at Monterail is one option but our efforts into growing leadership skills go beyond that. We are a partnership organization of Dare IT.
"At Monterail, we strive to foster diversity and be an inclusive employer. That is why I am proud that we are partners of the Dare IT Mentoring Program. It is a three-month program for women who want to find their first job in IT, led by experts working in the industry. I am happy that at Monterail we support and co-create this safe space to exchange knowledge.”
A few people from our company has attended the program both as mentees and mentors and here are their insights.
Joanna Kostana: For me, as a former mentee in the Dare IT mentoring program, it was a relationship that I haven't had before — used to a scientific approach, a strict hierarchy, and a clear teacher-student position with transmitting knowledge straightforward. This completely new experience has led me to where I am now - I managed to change the industry and join Monterail as a Junior Project Manager. So then I can be taken as an example that a career path change is possible and one of the crucial elements that can play a big role in this self-development process is a valuable relationship you can build with an inspiring person.
Anna Rakowiecka: Some time ago, I would think about myself as a Dare IT mentee, making my first steps as a project manager and switching from a very different career path. Last year, I had an opportunity to meet Dare IT from a different perspective - conducting a webinar for mentees with my colleague from Monterail. I’m so proud that we could share Monterail Way of working. It made me 200% clear that Monterail is one of the best places to be. So, this year, I became a mentor myself and I hope to share good practices further!
Benefits of Mentoring
Whichever you choose as the best solution for your needs, each cooperation and relationship requires an effort from both sides. Firstly determining the formula, then paying attention to organizational details, preparing for meetings, and maybe even doing some homework. It all needs constant commitment and concern from both the mentee and mentor sides. This work, however, is worth the effort. Effective communication, matching your expectations and needs can bring excellent results and real benefits.
"I applied for the DareIT mentoring program even though I had several years of experience as a manager of various levels. There, I chose the person who best suited my professional interests. This allowed me to discuss what I learned from books, courses, etc. with a practitioner and confront my knowledge with real experience. Thanks to this mentoring process I was able to organize better information on project management in the IT industry and detect potential gaps, but most of all I started to believe in myself and my skills."
If you are a mentee, mentoring can help you build a particular skill, stimulate discussions on some crucial ideas or just give you the confidence to face challenges. If you aren’t sure about your talents, strengths and potential, it can also help you with choosing the right path and doing the next steps.
By encouraging reflections, one of the general outcomes of the mentoring process might be just developing your self-awareness and ability to introspect. And regardless of your age, experience, or profession, these areas are worth developing constantly.
On the other hand, if you are an experienced and skilled professional, with a long work history in various companies, or just on many tough projects in the past. Do you remember being at the beginning of this path? Full of questions and doubts, analyzing your skills and potential, learning how to behave and which source of knowledge choose to learn from, what to do to fit the project and the client needs and so on - just discovering everything from scratch.
We’ve all been there.
How much easier it would be to learn all of this with the support of other people. Now you can be this person for new joiners in the industry or for just less experienced mentees who want to hear many thoughts you would like to share.
Transferring what you have learned can be just thrilling and become a source of appreciation. Hearing mentees say that they admire their mentor’s advice or achievements can easily boost confidence and motivation. Apart from that, building and maintaining a mentoring relationship can provide a mentor with different perspectives on many topics and reinforce their knowledge when confronted with the mentee’s views. It is just always good to meet new people, even if they are juniors or students. Every single connection in our field may be valuable, so being a mentor can also help expand your network. Finally, I would venture to say that mentoring can be the beginning of a professional friendship.
There is only one conclusion: mentoring truly supports both personal and professional development. My mentor gave me a lot of energy and wisdom, and above all, she convinced me to deeper self-reflection — to analyze my strengths and weaknesses, and develop my potential. And I appreciate even more these lessons which developed me as a human being rather than those related to professional competencies.
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