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Part of mentoring is letting the mentored fail and working through the after-action and identifying the learning opportunities. Controlling for how big or how

Part of mentoring is letting the mentored fail and working through the after-action and identifying the learning opportunities. Controlling for how big or how expensive that failure is are both necessary components of the task; don't let them fail in a way that's going to torpedo the company. But only being told how to do something makes a person a good follower and does nothing for their innovative or problem-solving skills. That's also bad management. A successful professional needs a back catalog of failures and misses to understand why to do something.

enraged_camel 11y ago
Yes, exactly. Mentorship is about guidance, not hand-holding. It is about asking questions the inexperienced employee may not have thought of on their own, but also letting them find the optimal solution on their own. For example, if they are designing a backup solution for the first time, asking them "what will the system do if the backup media is full?" is good. Telling them what it should do when full is bad. By asking the question, you're basically teaching them that there should be a contingency in case of failure. From there, a discussion on possible solutions can take place, where the mentor once again guides the employee to figure out the pros and cons of each approach. That said, I'd never knowingly let people fail. Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. If they don't, they are playing it too safe and aren't learning some important lessons, and it might be time to assign them more challenging projects.
- rustynails 11y ago
  That's a fantastic comment and example. Know your answer. Ask the question. I also highly respect Pixar's model - encourage collaboration and feedback between peers. I'm managing a team at the moment. We are a democratic group. I mostly ask Questions to steer toward success. The team (mostly women) are empowered to own, experiment, share and collaborate. It's been a fantastic experience. Interestingly, when we started, there was a lot of sass about gender superiority - but that's gone away since I expressed several times that we are all people, no other attitude will be tolerated.
- tveita 11y ago
  > Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. It also assumes you can predict every problem they'll encounter well enough to precisely ration out additional obstacles.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? People learn differently from experience than they do from being told something. >>It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. That's the thing though: people rarely make the same mistakes as you did. They tend to make different mistakes, and fail differently, with different results and consequences. By serving the solution to them on a silver platter, you're robbing them of very valuable learning opportunities. A mentor's job is to use their experience to guide the employee and help them figure out how to avoid mistakes. And if they do make a mistake, then the mentor is there to help them recover. The recovery is followed by by what I call "lesson time", which is a judgment-free session where we discuss why the incident or failure happened and come up with actionable steps to prevent it from happening again. If you find yourself in situations where you absolutely have to tell someone how to do something because failure would be fatal, at that point you should do that thing yourself, and have the employee watch you do it and take notes. That's another type of mentorship that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but it can be extremely valuable.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    > It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself This wasn't assumed in the premise, though the mentored may for sure have some experiences that the mentor did. Learning and internalization happen after we synthesize stories and narratives into lessons that we can deeply connect with. If a junior teammate comes to me with a solution and I say "I tried it that way once and it didn't work because xyz," that teammate will change their execution and, from my experience, not really internalize the xyz. This means they'll come back to me in the future with the same problem and we'll go through that again, because they didn't learn. The critical action in both success and failure is reflection. Discovering the lessons through discussion is the way for us both to learn, and to ensure the experience is meaningful and sticks.
jawilson2 11y ago
When I was a professor mentoring students, my approach could vary depending on the student and situation. If a student felt strongly about doing something a certain way, I might say "I would be surprised if this worked (because of XYZ), but prove me wrong!" There have been occasions where I was wrong, and many others where they failed but learned along the way. If it is a more time-critical or important project, then I will probably provide more guidance depending on the context ("give this a try first, and check back when you have results; if you're not happy, we can try your way"). This approach has carried over to industry well for me.

enraged_camel 11y ago

Yes, exactly. Mentorship is about guidance, not hand-holding. It is about asking questions the inexperienced employee may not have thought of on their own, but also letting them find the optimal solution on their own. For example, if they are designing a backup solution for the first time, asking them "what will the system do if the backup media is full?" is good. Telling them what it should do when full is bad. By asking the question, you're basically teaching them that there should be a contingency in case of failure. From there, a discussion on possible solutions can take place, where the mentor once again guides the employee to figure out the pros and cons of each approach. That said, I'd never knowingly let people fail. Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. If they don't, they are playing it too safe and aren't learning some important lessons, and it might be time to assign them more challenging projects.

rustynails 11y ago
That's a fantastic comment and example. Know your answer. Ask the question. I also highly respect Pixar's model - encourage collaboration and feedback between peers. I'm managing a team at the moment. We are a democratic group. I mostly ask Questions to steer toward success. The team (mostly women) are empowered to own, experiment, share and collaborate. It's been a fantastic experience. Interestingly, when we started, there was a lot of sass about gender superiority - but that's gone away since I expressed several times that we are all people, no other attitude will be tolerated.
tveita 11y ago
> Even without that, any good professional will have plenty of failures anyway. That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. It also assumes you can predict every problem they'll encounter well enough to precisely ration out additional obstacles.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together? People learn differently from experience than they do from being told something. >>It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself. That's the thing though: people rarely make the same mistakes as you did. They tend to make different mistakes, and fail differently, with different results and consequences. By serving the solution to them on a silver platter, you're robbing them of very valuable learning opportunities. A mentor's job is to use their experience to guide the employee and help them figure out how to avoid mistakes. And if they do make a mistake, then the mentor is there to help them recover. The recovery is followed by by what I call "lesson time", which is a judgment-free session where we discuss why the incident or failure happened and come up with actionable steps to prevent it from happening again. If you find yourself in situations where you absolutely have to tell someone how to do something because failure would be fatal, at that point you should do that thing yourself, and have the employee watch you do it and take notes. That's another type of mentorship that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but it can be extremely valuable.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  > It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself This wasn't assumed in the premise, though the mentored may for sure have some experiences that the mentor did. Learning and internalization happen after we synthesize stories and narratives into lessons that we can deeply connect with. If a junior teammate comes to me with a solution and I say "I tried it that way once and it didn't work because xyz," that teammate will change their execution and, from my experience, not really internalize the xyz. This means they'll come back to me in the future with the same problem and we'll go through that again, because they didn't learn. The critical action in both success and failure is reflection. Discovering the lessons through discussion is the way for us both to learn, and to ensure the experience is meaningful and sticks.

jawilson2 11y ago

When I was a professor mentoring students, my approach could vary depending on the student and situation. If a student felt strongly about doing something a certain way, I might say "I would be surprised if this worked (because of XYZ), but prove me wrong!" There have been occasions where I was wrong, and many others where they failed but learned along the way. If it is a more time-critical or important project, then I will probably provide more guidance depending on the context ("give this a try first, and check back when you have results; if you're not happy, we can try your way"). This approach has carried over to industry well for me.