Servant leader

Mentoring engineers

As a manager, you’re bound to mentor engineers that are direct or indirect report to you. As most of us reached our position through our hard earn experience, it’s only natural that people would love to seek wisdom from those that can guide them through their careers.

I am glad to be in a position that can empower other people’s careers. What’s better, I am in a company that is continuously improving in terms of the processes and tools that help us do the job more effectively. This includes coaching and mentoring our direct report.

Why mentoring?

In most of my hiring interviews, the better candidate regardless of junior or mid-level would usually ask about the mentor and support structure. I do resonate with them well in regards to this. At the end of the day, who wouldn’t want to progress in their career?

My opinion of mentoring most of the time falls into either of these 2 categories. The way we would approach them varies too.

  • Technical growth
  • Goals and career growth
Technical growth

Obvious enough, when one onboard with a technical job they expect nothing less than to continue improving their craft. What better way to encourage them to pick up challenges that fall into their day-to-day work.

The truth is…  Our role as a people manager consumed the majority of our bandwidth. Therefore, we are technically less proficient than the engineers who work with the technical aspect of the application most of the time.

From time to time, some challenges need help to unblock. We try to facilitate and guide them in the right direction. That’s it. Also, our role as a mentor is to open their eye to problems that aren’t noticeable to them. And then, provide support for them. That would mean providing the resource or helping them to connect to the people with the right expertise.

Goals and career growth

To start, we have been continuously improving our onboarding process. This includes coaching with:

Also, we have established a career pathway for the individual contributor and management track to grow. I found it fun and rewarding to be able to be part of their career development, helping to align their skills and specialization that can help to bring impact for both the company and our direct report.

Building trust

At the end of the day, is all about building trust between our direct report and the team. 1:1 with the manager holds a special place to be personal and discuss things that matter personally.

Once every quarter, we used the company check-in cycle to cross-check on the progress and make sure they remain happy and motivated to continue learning and growing.