Mentoring at Qatium

What mentoring is for

We establish mentoring relationships to:

Help mentees to contribute to the team in a way that’s appropriate both for them and the team/company.
Help mentees make progress individually based on their own interests and motivations.
Ensure everyone in the team has someone that can give them feedbak.

Your mentor is not your superior or your supervisor.
Your mentor is not responsible for your progress, you are.
Your mentor is not paired with you forever. Those relationships can and should change with time.
Your mentor is not the only person who can help you. You can and maybe should still ask other people in the team.

Here are core concepts you can follow when mentoring a team member:

It’s crucial to align individual interests and motivations with the needs of the company.
Generally, we prefer to give perspective to mentees rather than guiding or leading them.
It’s important to consider the difference between participating in team activities vs driving those activities forward. “Just participating” somehow is always a good point to start from.
Mentors can help a lot by just sharing their own experiences.
It can be helpful for mentors to know long-term expectations of the mentees and even who are people of reference for them.
Mentors can help a lot by giving peace of mind to mentees.
Mentors can help a lot by sharing their own vulnerabilities, difficulties and challenges.
Many team members are quite demanding with themselves. Having a mentor can help with that.
As a second order benefit, mentors and mentees can detect areas to work on to improve our team and our product.
It’s crucial that mentees drive their mentorship. In other words, we expect them to do the most of the homework.
It’s very helpful for the mentorship to spend time together in the day to day (pairing on tasks for example)
Have a periodic short catch-up meeting every 2 weeks.
A dynamic that is working well for some mentorships is to share periodically what’s happened for both the mentee and the mentor. “How have your last 2 weeks been?”