Now Taking Applications for Mentees

Posted on July 18, 2012 by andywarren

Looking for a mentor? We’ve got more than 50 mentors all ready to go to mentor someone, it could be you! Ideal candidates work with or close to SQL Server (the primary source of our mentors right now) and are looking for guidance – maybe a career decision, where to focus learning, or maybe even something to do with soft skills. Remember that mentoring isn’t training. Our mentors will listen and guide you, but they aren’t there to teach you how to write better queries or SSIS packages – but they will tell you how and where to learn to do those things, and more!

Apply by filling our short survey application, it’s only 10 questions. We’ll review the answers from all the candidates and through the course of a few different matching ideas we’ll match 50 (or more!) of you with a mentor that you’ll meet with by phone at least once a month for four months. Thinking four months isn’t long? We think you’ll be surprised by how much you can accomplish when paired with a talented mentor.

Posted in Mentoring | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Apply to Be A Mentor in the Next Experiment!

Posted on April 24, 2012 by andywarren

We’re getting ready to start our second experiment here at TME, this time with a focus on mentors. One of the things we learned from our first experiment is that there are a lot of people wanting mentors, far more than we expected, which means we need a lot of mentors! The first part of our next experiment is focused on learning some things about mentors:

  • How big is the mentor pool within the SQL Server community?
  • How do we qualify mentor applicants?
  • What do potential mentors expect to gain – is it just pay it forward, or are there more granular goals?
  • Can they describe their “ideal” mentee? That’s really interesting, because if they can it both helps us make good matches and it increases the chances that the match will be successful.
  • How do we handle it when we don’t think someone is not qualified to be a mentor? Or when we don’t have a candidate that matches to them?

Are you interested in being a mentor? If so, please fill out this very short nine question survey. We’ll be taking applications through May 21st, 2012. It will take us a couple weeks to look through the data and after that we’ll do the first of a few groups of mentor/mentee pairings in early June, and continue launching new pairings in groups of 5 to 10 until we run out of mentors (or mentees!).

For those of you wanting to be mentored, we’ll publish that application in early May (and yes, you can be a mentor and a mentee).

Posted in Mentoring | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Mentoring Experiment at the 2011 PASS Summit

Posted on September 13, 2011 by stevejones

Last year Andy Warren and Steve Jones sponsored an informal networking event on Sunday night for people that might be new to the Summit or just looking for something to do with fellow attendees. It was a great success and we are looking to do it again, this time sponsored by The Mentoring Experiment.

Once again it will be at Lowell’s, in the Pikes Place Market complex.

You an register at EventBrite for the evening, which is really to get us an idea of the crowd size. We”ve sponsored the event only in that we rented the restaurant. You are responsible for your own food and beverage tab, but we hope you”ll come out and join us for an evening to meet many of your fellow colleagues in town for the Summit.


View Larger Map

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

End of Cycle 1, Planning for Cycle 2, and Chemistry

Posted on September 11, 2011 by andywarren

Last week we sent out the email to all the cycle one mentors and mentees that the final talks for this round would wrap up by the end of September. In the beginning we weren’t sure about such a short cycle, but now that we’ve gone through one we really like the idea of a three to four month trial period. Mentors and mentees have the option to continue, but for those where it wasn’t a great match or a lot of good has already been done, it’s a great time to re-evaluate what is good for the pair. We haven’t done the surveys yet, but the feedback we have from the mentors on our monthly calls is that the first few calls are very valuable to the mentees, they get pointed in the right direction, and then it takes some time to execute, time in which a quick check-in may be needed, but often it’s just talking through the questions and decisions the mentee has open. We’ll be reporting in more detail after we finish our surveys and have our in person meeting with most of the mentors in October.

We’re definitely going to do a second cycle, and then we’ll probably go to a quarterly or bi-monthly rhythm of launching new cycles after that. At this point it will probably be January for cycle 2, as we need time to digest lessons learned and start to formalize some of the patterns we believe are needed. We also have to gather a new group of mentors and have some training prepared for them. The training won’t be extensive, but we can definitely do some things to make the first couple calls easier and to set realistic expectations.

I’ll go out on a limb and share an early thought – chemistry only matters over the long term. I believe it’s possible to do a lot of good in a 3-4 month mentoring pairing,that’s the time of the biggest gains for both parties. The mentee gains valuable insight and experience as a mentee,they know better what matters to them in a mentor. The mentor also gets a much better idea of what kind of mentee they want. I also see strong parallels to the lessons we’ve seen around SQLSaturday, our speaker pool is larger and stronger because there are opportunities to practice.

It’s too early to call it a win, but I’m thrilled that the “experiment” part has been so productive, and thank all those that have participated!

Posted in Mentoring | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Few Definitions

Posted on August 25, 2011 by stevejones

I realized as I’ve been drafting some blog posts and trying to write a bit about mentoring and realized that it’s hard. There often isn’t a good way to describe the situations and people involved. I thought a post that explains what I mean as I’m writing might help us develop a common framework to understand the blog.

Mentoring – In the context that we see it, mentoring is the offering of advice, ideas, perspective, and thoughts to another person about how they might view, or deal with, a situation in their life. It does not involve specific teaching of skills or step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish a task. IT is done

Mentee – The individual that is looking for advice or help in advancing their career or achieving their own goals in life.

Mentor – The individual that is offering advice, and perspective to the mentee to try and help them advance their career.

Coaching – Teaching specific skills, and working with someone else in a step-by-step manner to help them build or improve a specific skill.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Endorsements

Posted on July 21, 2011 by stevejones

A very interesting post from Tim Mitchell on the request for a recommendation or endorsement. It’s not directly related to mentoring, but there are some interesting parallels.

In my mind, the requests you might get from mentoring are similar. The request to even be a mentor is very similar as well. We will all get awkward requests at times, especially when you are a mentor or coach to others. As mentees or students, we might want to make an awkward request, or ask for something that pushes the boundaries of the relationship.

It’s hard to get turned down, or turn someone down, but there are times it is appropriate and we have to learn to deal with those situations. This shouldn’t ruin a relationship, and both sides should remember that a request is just that: a request. It’s also not a barometer that future requests will be granted or denied.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Mentee or Protégé?

Posted on June 27, 2011 by andywarren

Are all mentees proteges? Or vice versa?

Until the last year or so I’ve always thought of mentoring as having a mentor (the teacher) and the protégé (student). The roles are more complex than that of course, but that’s a good generalization of the pattern. What does protégé really mean though, and is it different than a mentee? For me the idea of a protégé has to do with a senior person (the mentor) taking an active interest in the career path of the junior. Working to make sure they meet the right people, trying to get them assignments that will help them grow, protecting them when they run into an adversary with the organization, and more. It’s a relationship that often directly benefits both parties. It’s obviously good for the junior, but it’s a coup for the senior as well if they can point to someone they are grooming and that person is coming along well. I don’t mean to make it sound cynical or self-serving. It might be, it might not, either way the relationship holds tremendous value for the junior person in the pair.

I’ve come to think of mentees as being slightly different. For me a mentee is someone away from the place of work of the mentor. They still want to help them grow, still want to help them meet people and make decisions about assignments, but they aren’t pulling the levers in quite the same way, for perhaps quite the same reasons. But does that capture the difference? Can you only have a protégé if you work for the same company? Mostly,but not always. Is it a deeper level of commitment? Maybe.

It feels like splitting hairs. Maybe it is. I think about my current mentee and I just wouldn’t feel like I would be doing describing the relationship accurately if I spoke of him as my protégé. I enjoy my time chatting with him,we have good conversations, and I think it’s helping. Over time – because only time can do it – it may deepen into a true protégé type relationship, even though we don’t share employers or career paths, or it may stay the way it is, or, more likely to me, we’ll go some distance and the relationship will convert to one of peers and friends.

In the end what we call it matters less than what we accomplish, but maybe thinking about what we call it defines what we might accomplish. I’ll continue to work on my definition. I think it’s an important part of learning how I want to mentor.

Posted in Mentoring | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mentoring and Coaching

Posted on June 27, 2011 by stevejones

Andy and I started The Mentoring Experiment with the idea that we could help people and try to learn something about how to accomplish that in a scalable way. I’m happy to mentor people, but I have limited time, and there are lots of other people in the world both willing to help and needing help.

We opened a call for applications, wanting to run a short cycle and learn some lessons that we could apply in the future. Hopefully we can grow and expand the program to help a lot more than the 10 people in our first cycle.

An interesting thing occurred. As I reviewed the applications, I found that there were so many people that had entered their mentoring goals like this:

“I really would like to learn more about Reporting Services. I hope that my mentor can answer some questions on how Reporting Services works and how to configure advanced options.”

Those are good goals, but those aren’t the  things a mentor helps you with. Those types of career help come from a coach, or a trainer, or someone else that works with you on your day to day skills. These are low level, detailed, specific training. In my mind, if you are getting this type of knowledge and help, this is really the type of teaching that should be paid for in this business.

Mentoring,at least how we define it,is a very high level of listening, advising, and guiding someone to make better decisions. Rather than address specific questions, a mentor should help you think through them, help you find other sources of information, or help you figure out how to learn it yourself.

I am sure other people feel differently about what mentoring entails and perhaps Andy and I did not make it clear, but I hope I can provide a good definition for people as we move forward in the experiment.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Hardest Part

Posted on May 23, 2011 by stevejones

Throughout our discussions on The Mentoring Experiment there was one thing that I dreaded: the need to send out rejection emails to applicants. I could call them “delayed entrance notes” or “unaccepted application” notes or something else, but most people will probably view them as rejection letters. I know I would.

As Andy and I discussed the challenges of mentoring and the positive things we could achieve with the experiment, we thought there was a chance that we might have five applicants for ten mentors, but a small chance. In all likelihood, however, we would expect to have more applicants than mentors. We weren’t sure if we’re have 20 or 200 or 20,000, but we thought we’d have more.

That meant the need to send out notes to people that weren’t selected. I ended up doing that this morning for most of the applicants. Our final tally was 224 applicants for our ten mentor selections. I wrote a bit about the selection process recently, and after getting our acceptances over the last week, it’s time for the thing I dreaded.

We do hope to expand this process in the fall, and I’ve started making notes and scheduling out the initial calls with our mentors to talk about how things are going for them. We hope that we can learn a few things, provide a rough guideline and framework for mentors,and then accept dozens,or hundreds more mentors as we move forward. At some point it would be great to have enough people willing to help others that we can match everyone up.

For now, however, I have to break the bad news to a couple of hundred people, which makes for a sad start to my day.

Steve

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 3 Comments