Mentoring is a subject I am passionate about. I have a fiction mentor currently and have had other mentors for other disciplines in the past. I also mentor others on a pretty regular basis. I’m not sure if it’s my love for instructional design that makes me so passionate about mentoring, but I don’t remember more than a month or two over the last decade when I wasn’t active mentoring someone. I just love to teach others and see their successes.
Although I’ve been a published technical author for years, I only became a full-time writer in January of 2009, right after I was laid off in the first round of the big layoffs at Big Software Company. For the twelve years prior to that, I was a software tester (both as a software test engineer (STE) and a software development engineer in test (SDET)). I had already been in the process of trying to move to a writing role within the company when I was laid off, so I set up an LLC at that time and began taking on freelance technical writing jobs. Not long after that, I was hired back at Big Software Company as a Programming Writer – first contract, then as a full-time regular employee.
When I came back to Big Software Company in a role completely new to me, I really was a bit adrift. I knew the company and I knew how to write but I didn’t know what tools my new group used or where documents or databases were located. I didn’t know who the various team members were and who was in charge of what. I didn’t know my new product. I was really confused and was pretty much plopped down at a (not set up yet) computer and left to sink or swim. I’m pretty resourceful and very stubborn so I set out learning how to swim. I introduced myself to some of the other writers, the editors, the content production people. I asked them for any “new hire” information they might have. I went to the engineering team for our product and started introducing myself around there too.
It was a very interesting first couple of months when you combine the newness, the fact my lead didn’t have time to bring me up to speed, the fact there was more than a little bad blood between the content and the product teams. The little getting started information I had was out of date, too. It’s not called “drinking from a firehose” for nothing.
Now, as a tester, there were almost always documents, plans, new hire guides, etc. available that would help you get up to speed. And the other testers on my teams had always been able to spare an hour or two to give me a brain dump so I’d get up to speed faster and start being productive. About half the time I approached someone and about half the time the more veteran testers on a project approached me. My test leads were always big advocates of buddying new testers up and would often make time to do their own “lay of the land” orientations as well. The goal was always to get the new people up to speed as quickly as possible and doing real work.
After I’d gotten my own feet under me and, partly as a by-product of a change in the content group’s management, began to take on responsibilities and be productive as a writer, I started keeping my own set of information on all the things a new hire to the team needed to know – both hard information and the sort of tribal knowledge that you tend to only learn from making mistakes. As this body of knowledge grew, I started asking both my lead and his own lead why there wasn’t some sort of mentoring or buddy system in technical communications – or at least not in OUR technical communications group.
The sad thing was – no one could really answer me other than to say that writing tended to be a very solitary job.
I’ve now been a full-time technical writer for two years, I’ve talked to a bunch of other writers and I’ve got a list of what I think may play a role in the lack of mentoring. This may be biased toward Big Software Company, because that’s where I’ve been able to see situations play out and talk to others but maybe it’s not as company-centric as I think.
- Mentoring is not a formulaic process and contains a fair amount of uncertainty, playing it by ear, and brainstorming without clear answers being evident. This ambiguity is often not a great match for many of the writers I’ve talked to. They much prefer being able to show how to do something in clear steps and are not able to easily change modes or be comfortable with merely offering some insight or tossing around a bunch of ideas without a definitive right or wrong.
- Mentoring means taking time from your focused work. Most writers try very hard to stay focused on their work and mentoring has a degree of randomness built into it. If you mentor someone physically near you, you may get interrupted for questions on an ad-hoc basis.
- Mentoring is a partnership between mentor and mentee and unless clear rules are defined, either of the parties (or both) can feel neglected or pestered. Yet it’s rare to find a set of reasonable ground rules for mentors and mentees.
- Mentoring can be abused. Mentees can want the mentor to do their work for them or find their answers instead of showing them how to find them. Mentors can try to offload work or research on mentees in the guise of teaching them. Mentees can even use a lot of the mentor’s time to get help but then be unwilling to actually act on any of it.
- Mentoring means teaching someone your tricks. In some corporate cultures, great stock is placed in individual knowledge and performance and not as much in team knowledge and performance. I’ve heard more than once that a writer is unwilling to mentor another writer because then the other writer will improve and thus threaten that first writer’s standing.
- Mentoring means putting yourself out there. Mentors have to offer to help. Mentees have to be able to ask for help. These can both cause feelings of vulnerability and can be taken as a sign the writer isn’t “good enough” and it takes some moxy to get past that.
- Mentoring can be unsupported by management, management can place time limits on it or can even decide it’s a waste of time. When a writer can get chastised for giving or asking for help, they will tend to either not do it or hide it.
- Mentoring requires an ability to look beyond what both parties are writing and toward more universal concepts and skills or even different ways to apply knowledge outside the box it was originally learned in. It requires more of a big picture view, especially on the part of the mentor.
- Mentoring requires both parties to check their egos at the door. It’s really more of a two-way learning experience than many give it credit for.
The next installment in this series will talk about being an effective mentor.
