Have you met people who, at the first difficulty, do not try to overcome it on their own, but run to a more experienced friend for help? The senior colleague suggests a solution, and everyone seems to be happy, but the senior was distracted, and the junior did not earn his own experience.
And there are people who, it would seem, are excellent specialists and professionals. But they have low professional self-esteem and are afraid to take on more than they currently have. And there are still people who have a hard time assimilating new information, they need to draw everything with squares and arrows, or even more than once. And not two.
These people are often united by the fact that at one time they came across a bad teacher at school or a bad mentor already on their career path.
It's easy to be a bad mentor. It can be difficult to notice a bad mentor, he may seem good in appearance and not understand that he makes mistakes.
Mistakes are expensive
The relationship between a mentor and a student can be compared to that of a parent and child. Both the parent and the mentor have great influence, while at the same time both the student and the child may not be aware of whether they have a good mentor or a bad one.
Just as parenting mistakes can last a lifetime for a child, mentoring mistakes can last throughout a professional career. Errors of this kind sit deep, and it is not always possible to reliably determine their source.
How to recover from these errors, I do not know. The same long road, as in the case of parents - awareness of the problem and subsequent self-control. Therefore, the mentor must understand and accept the share of responsibility entrusted to him.
Equality
The most critical mistake that anyone who has influence over another person can make is instilling a sense of inferiority. As a mentor, in no case should you position yourself from the point of view that you, the mentor, are a first-class specialist, and your authority is unshakable, and the student is no one and call him Nothing.
Such a line of behavior is a direct path to the birth of a professional cripple.
This often happens if a person goes to mentoring in order to shake up his HR against the background of younger, less professional colleagues, in order to show them (and, above all, himself) how cool he is.
At the same time, I am not saying that it is impossible to go into mentoring for the sake of your HR, it is possible, of course, but only on the condition that your HR grows from the idea of teaching and learning, from the idea that excellent specialists come out from under your hand.
Hyperopia
Overprotection is as much an emotional corruption as instilling a sense of inferiority.
When you are a mentor, your desire to see good results from your work can be expressed in the fact that you will succumb to the temptation to help the mentee unnecessarily, or even do everything instead of him, not allowing your own experience to form.
In such cases, there is a high chance that in the end your student will turn out to be dependent, disorganized and inexperienced. And if not lucky, then he still will not be aware of it.
Thus, hyper-custody, you run the risk of raising a person who, up to the age of 40, for any problem, even with appropriate preparation, will run to the team leader in the manner of how people under 40 live with their parents because of the fear of an independent life.
Let your students learn to solve problems themselves, and only when the understanding comes that they are completely at an impasse, then come to their aid, suggesting further steps.
The student is not dumb
Against the background of the previous mistake, it is not very difficult to make another one - to make the student feel stupid.
There is one cognitive distortion that is beautiful in its insidiousness, the “curse of knowledge” familiar to many. It lies in the fact that if you know some section of knowledge for a long time and well, then for you this knowledge seems quite understandable and lying on the surface. But when you try to explain them, you will encounter a complete misunderstanding. There can be many reasons for misunderstanding, from banal complexity to the fact that your explanations are based on other things that must first be understood.
Thus, it is easy to come to a situation when you are trying to explain something to a student, but he does not understand, then you start to get annoyed by this, and the student notices, understands your emotions, and he will sit at home all evening, listen to sad music and think that he is dumb and not fit for the profession.
The icing on the cake of consequences may be that at that moment you decide that you are also a so-so teacher.
And you just need to explain to yourself and the ward the essence of the phenomenon, tell what happens to everyone, that you don’t have to be afraid of it and draw conclusions based on it.
I personally remember very well how I could not understand the idea of asynchrony, did not understand what advantages it gives and what disadvantages. I was told once, a second time, a third time. It seems to be understood, but still very ambiguous.
And now, after a while, for me it seems clear, obvious and lying on the surface.
Duck syndrome
Another problem following from the previous ones. There is a wonderful phenomenon called the duckling syndrome. I am sure that almost everyone knows about it, but still I will explain: duckling syndrome is a phenomenon in which a specialist considers the first studied technology or studied tool to be the best.
As a mentor, you are fully responsible for telling a new person in the profession that the world does not work that way, that all tools are useful and important, all have their pros and cons, and you should not expect that the career path will always go with the same technologies at hand.
Otherwise, you will get another specialist who has signed up to be an adherent of a tool or technology, and they are not very popular, in fact, they often gather in groups and discuss that their programming language is the best, and other languages are jealous.
There can be many of the above mistakes, these are only the most superficial ones, but, despite this, they continue to be repeated and spoil people's careers.
These are the things that bad mentors do, but let's talk about what good mentors do.
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This is also quite obvious, but not everyone realizes the importance of feedback.
First, feedback is needed so that the mentee does not draw wrong conclusions. It works very simply - people tend to try to find the answer on their own within the framework of uncertainty. A person with low self-esteem will surely find evidence that things are not going well for him, that he is not coping and this profession is not for him. Conversely, a person with inflated self-esteem may start to fly in the clouds and stop developing based on the idea that he is already cool enough.
Secondly, the nature of the feedback should be selected strictly for the student. It will be difficult for shy people to respond correctly to feedback in a negotiation in 1 on 1 conversations, and someone wants to receive feedback more formally in the form of a detailed letter, for someone it’s enough to chat in a messenger, where you can normally think over the following words and hide emotions, if any There is.
Thirdly, you, as a mentor, also need feedback. Perhaps you should develop your mentoring skills better somewhere, maybe the student sees something that you do not see.
All this revolves around a simple and understandable principle - transparency. The more transparent your relationship, the easier it is for all parties.
Accounting for progress
Without taking progress into account, it will be very difficult to draw the right conclusions at the end of the training. The reason for this is quite simple - without taking into account progress, your conclusions will be based on your memory, and it works differently for everyone, someone remembers the good better, someone bad, so the result of your reflections on the student’s success may differ from the objective very strongly.
In addition, there is such a phenomenon as the brightness of recent memories in comparison with older ones, so a successfully passed stage or, conversely, a conflict can provoke a greater subjectivity of the conclusions.
It is enough just to keep a sign, which will describe the tasks of the student, your expectations and what happened in reality, and in general all personal impressions at every stage of each day of training, this is very convenient for future analysis.
Disclosure of expectations
Continuation of the theme by the development of maximum transparency in relations.
Do not hide from the wards your expectations about their success. This is important for the same reason as feedback - the student's uncertainty about the goal can serve as an incentive for him to set these goals for himself, and whether they will differ from the desired ones or not - as lucky.
If everything is already bad
If you feel that you or your mentor are making such mistakes, then don't be afraid to talk and consider whether you want the possible consequences.
If you have already faced the consequences of bad mentoring, then I would give advice up to going to a psychotherapist and discussing problems with him, since it may not work out on your own.
I want to emphasize that being a mentor is a lot more responsible than many might think.
Total
Remember the main thing. You go to mentors not just to become a mentor and scratch your PCS. And certainly not in order to realize how cool and experienced you are against the background of beginners or juniors.
You do this in order to ensure a quality transfer of knowledge, to help a colleague become more confident and better at tasks. By the way, sometimes a strange stereotype is voiced, they say, to be a mentor and train someone in your own company = to raise a competitor for yourself, people believe that in this case it is more profitable to isolate knowledge, supposedly this will make you a more valuable employee.
If, while teaching a junior the intricacies of the profession, you really think that now he will definitely become the reason for your dismissal, I have bad news for you.
Source: habr.com