LHere is a great blog post that was written about mentoring new programmers, but could easily be applied to other disciplines and experienced hires too:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/five-tips/?p=212
These tips are rather incomplete, though. I'd like to expand on their tips:
- The issue with mentoring seems not to be lack of will, but lack of time. More on this in a bit.
- Make sure your road map covers more than just the first few hours. It is all well and good to show the new employee the location of the documentation, but have a plan that covers at least the first six months. This plan should include ways to make the employee more independent as time goes on.
- Be tolerant of mistakes, but try to prevent common or serious ones. Confidence building is key.
- Try to assign projects at first that have a training purpose as well as a practical purpose for the company. This should be a mixture of easy projects to give the employee confidence and stretch projects to keep him or her engaged.
While most of us would agree with these tips, very often they're not followed. Why? The biggest reason seems to be that people usually aren't hired for a potential need, they're hired to fill a current one. While that approach lowers the risk for the company of hiring someone who will need to be laid off, it also makes it harder for managers and experienced co-workers to get the employee up to speed in a fashion that benefits both the employee and the company. The easiest way around this that I can see is to keep track of potential future needs (perhaps by using risk modeling tools such as
these) and hire based on that. Outsourcing and contract-to-hire positions can mitigate the risk of over-hiring, if needed. Good mentoring is a lot easier when one feels like there is time to do it well.
Mentoring is often one of the aspects of my job that I struggle keeping at the forefront of my priorities. I agree completely with you that mentoring falls to the back-burner, not because of a lack of will, but because of a lack of time. I have one direct report that I plan to replace me when I move on, but I find it hard to take his time because he is performing the responsibilities I have assigned him.
ReplyDeleteI understand that this is my time management problem, not his. I don't feel that I can justify the time off from my projects to mentor and do his work so he can make time for me to mentor him. It is because of this that mentoring happens only in rare simultaneous lulls.