The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-magazine-part-2/
[Anuj] Let’s see what role a good mentor plays. As I have seen, a good mentor:
1. helps you become as good as you can be.
2. observes, judges and guides (in that order).
3. asks the right questions at the right time. A mentor uses questions as a tool to bring you closer to solution.
4. will not give you all the answers but still teach you how to think.
5. helps you see the mirror through which you can judge your performance.
6. know how to break down performance into its critical individual components and suggest a plan for ailing components.
7. focus less on themselves and more on the mentees.
8. Helps mentees find blind spots in the performance.
A few years back, I enrolled myself in toastmasters club. The toastmasters club is focused on improving the public speaking skills. One of the effective mechanisms used in toastmasters club to improve public speaking skills is to break-down the frequent problems ailing communication in different buckets and then you receive an quantifiable feedback from judges on what went right and what went wrong.
The mere act of a few dedicated people dissecting your speech and providing you feedback enables you to improve communication skills that otherwise would need painfully longer to achieve.
Atul Gawande a renowned surgeon brought about remarkable improvement in his surgery skills by onboarding a coach who could give him feedback by observing live during an operation. Before Atul came up with this idea, he had been doing operations for around a decade, had done 2000 plus operations. He could have comforted himself feeling that he is an expert but he chose to extend the boundaries and seek feedback.
As he says in his inspirational article, goes on to say-
“Knowledge of disease and the science of treatment are always evolving. We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind. So the training inculcates an ethic of perfectionism. Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.”
Isn’t the situation explained in this quote very similar to information technology (and by virtue of it, software testing) profession?
To stay relevant, we are having to build capabilities faster than the rate at which technology is changing. And we cannot achieve the career velocity by just reading the books or taking training courses. A good mentor helps fill the performance gaps that we feel does not even exist.
A couple of more perspectives to consider:
1. As much as good mentoring can help us scale new heights, it bears repeating that bad mentoring can make professionals worse. Choose your mentors wisely.
2. Good mentors can make you uncomfortable. It can be intimidating to think that someone is observing you, judging you and more often will give feedback that may make you look incompetent. For a mentoring relationship to work, it is the job of a mentee to give confidence to the mentor that he/she will be a good recipient of the feedback.
Q) How having a mentor / coach helps a tester be lead in a better path?
[Anuj] Let’s see what role a good mentor plays. As I have seen, a good mentor:
1. helps you become as good as you can be.
2. observes, judges and guides (in that order).
3. asks the right questions at the right time. A mentor uses questions as a tool to bring you closer to solution.
4. will not give you all the answers but still teach you how to think.
5. helps you see the mirror through which you can judge your performance.
6. know how to break down performance into its critical individual components and suggest a plan for ailing components.
7. focus less on themselves and more on the mentees.
8. Helps mentees find blind spots in the performance.
A few years back, I enrolled myself in toastmasters club. The toastmasters club is focused on improving the public speaking skills. One of the effective mechanisms used in toastmasters club to improve public speaking skills is to break-down the frequent problems ailing communication in different buckets and then you receive an quantifiable feedback from judges on what went right and what went wrong.
The mere act of a few dedicated people dissecting your speech and providing you feedback enables you to improve communication skills that otherwise would need painfully longer to achieve.
Atul Gawande a renowned surgeon brought about remarkable improvement in his surgery skills by onboarding a coach who could give him feedback by observing live during an operation. Before Atul came up with this idea, he had been doing operations for around a decade, had done 2000 plus operations. He could have comforted himself feeling that he is an expert but he chose to extend the boundaries and seek feedback.
As he says in his inspirational article, goes on to say-
“Knowledge of disease and the science of treatment are always evolving. We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind. So the training inculcates an ethic of perfectionism. Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.”
Isn’t the situation explained in this quote very similar to information technology (and by virtue of it, software testing) profession?
To stay relevant, we are having to build capabilities faster than the rate at which technology is changing. And we cannot achieve the career velocity by just reading the books or taking training courses. A good mentor helps fill the performance gaps that we feel does not even exist.
A couple of more perspectives to consider:
1. As much as good mentoring can help us scale new heights, it bears repeating that bad mentoring can make professionals worse. Choose your mentors wisely.
2. Good mentors can make you uncomfortable. It can be intimidating to think that someone is observing you, judging you and more often will give feedback that may make you look incompetent. For a mentoring relationship to work, it is the job of a mentee to give confidence to the mentor that he/she will be a good recipient of the feedback.
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