Have you ever met people who, at the first difficulty, do not try to overcome it on their own, but run to a more experienced comrade for help? A senior colleague suggests a solution, and everyone seems happy, but the senior got distracted, and the junior did not earn his own experience.
And then 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 have now. And then there are people who have a hard time absorbing new information, they need to draw everything with squares and arrows, and sometimes more than once. And not twice.
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 the career path.
It is easy to be a bad mentor. It can be difficult to notice a bad mentor, he may seem good on the surface and not understand that he makes mistakes.
The relationship between a mentor and a student can be compared to the relationship between a parent and a child. Both the parent and the mentor have a great deal of influence, while both the student and the child may not realize or be aware of whether their mentor is good or bad.
Just as parental mistakes can follow a child throughout their life, mentoring mistakes can extend throughout their entire professional career. Mistakes of this kind are deep-seated, and it is not always possible to reliably determine their source.
I do not know how to cure these mistakes. The same long road as in the case of parents - awareness of the problem and subsequent self-control. Therefore, a mentor must understand and accept the share of responsibility placed on him.
The most critical mistake that anyone who has influence over another person can make is instilling a sense of inferiority. As a mentor, you should never 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 a nobody and his name is Nothing.
Such a line of behavior is a direct path to the birth of a professional cripple.
This often happens if a person goes into mentoring with the goal of pumping up his ego against the background of younger, less professional colleagues, with the goal of showing them (and first of all, himself) how cool he is.
At the same time, I am not saying that you cannot go into mentoring for the sake of your ego, you can, of course, but only on the condition that your ego grows from the idea of teaching and learning, from the idea that excellent specialists come out from under your hand.
Overprotection is the same emotional damage as instilling a sense of inferiority.
When you are a mentor, your desire to see good results from your work may be expressed in the fact that you will succumb to the temptation to help your mentee too much, or even do everything for him, not allowing him to develop his own experience.
In such cases, there is a high chance that your student will end up dependent, disorganized and inexperienced. And if you are unlucky, he will not even realize it.
Thus, by overprotecting, you risk raising a person who, until the age of 40, will run to the team leader for any problem, even with the appropriate training, in the same way as people under 40 live with their parents because of the fear of independent life.
Let your students learn to solve problems themselves, and only when they understand that they are completely at a dead end, then come to their aid, suggesting further steps.
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 wonderful in its insidious cognitive distortion, familiar to many "the curse of knowledge". 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 it, you will encounter a complete misunderstanding. There can be many reasons for the misunderstanding, from banal complexity to the fact that your explanations are based on other things that first need to be understood.
Thus, it is easy to come to a situation when you are trying to explain something to a student, and he does not understand, then you begin to get irritated by this, and the student notices, understands your emotions, and the whole evening he will sit at home, listen to sad music and think that he is stupid and not suitable for the profession.
The cherry on the cake of consequences may be that at this moment you decide that you are also a lousy teacher.
And you just need to explain to yourself and your ward the essence of the phenomenon, tell them that this happens to everyone, that you shouldn't be afraid of it and draw conclusions based on it.
I personally remember very well how I couldn't understand the idea of asynchronicity, didn't understand what advantages it gives and what disadvantages. It was explained to me once, a second time, a third time. It seemed like I understood, but it was still very ambiguous.
But now, after some time, it seems clear, obvious and obvious to me.
Another problem that follows from the previous ones. There is a wonderful phenomenon called the duckling syndrome. I am sure that almost everyone knows about it, but I will still explain: the duckling syndrome is a phenomenon in which a specialist considers the first technology or tool studied to be the best.
As a mentor, you are fully responsible for telling a new person in the profession that the world is not arranged like that, that all tools are useful and important, they all have their pros and cons, and you should not expect that your career path will always go with the same technologies at your side.
Otherwise, you will get another specialist who has signed up as an adherent of a tool or technology, and such people are not very popular, in fact, they often gather in groups and discuss that their programming language is the best, and other languages are envious. There
can be many of the above mistakes, these are only the most superficial ones, but despite this, they continue to be repeated and ruin people's careers.
These are things bad mentors do, but let's talk about what good mentors do.
This is also quite an obvious thing, but not everyone realizes the importance of feedback.
Firstly, feedback is needed to prevent the mentee from making wrong conclusions. It works very simply - people tend to try to find an answer on their own within the unknown. A person with low self-esteem will probably find confirmation that he is doing poorly, that he is not coping and this profession is not for him. And vice versa, a person with high self-esteem can start to fly in the clouds and will stop developing based on the thoughts that he is already cool enough.
Secondly, the nature of the feedback should be selected strictly for the student. Shy people will find it difficult to react correctly to feedback in a meeting room in 1 on 1 conversations, and someone wants to receive feedback more formally in the form of a detailed letter, for someone correspondence in a messenger is enough, where you can normally think over the next words and hide your emotions, if any. Thirdly
, you, as a mentor, also need feedback. Maybe you need to develop your mentoring skills better somewhere, maybe the student sees something that you don’t.
It all revolves around a simple and clear principle – transparency. The more transparent your relationship is, the easier it is for all parties.
Without taking into account progress, 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 the bad, so the result of your reflections on the topic of the student's successes may differ from the objective very much.
In addition, there is such a phenomenon as the brightness of the last memories in comparison with older ones, so a successfully completed stage or, conversely, a conflict, can provoke greater subjectivity of conclusions.
It is enough to simply keep a table where the student's tasks, your expectations and what happened in reality, and in general all personal impressions at each stage of each day of training will be described, this is very convenient for future analysis.
Continuing the theme of developing maximum transparency in relationships.
Do not hide your expectations about your students' successes. 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 differ from the desired ones or not is a matter of luck.
If you feel that you or your mentor are making such mistakes, then don’t be afraid to talk and think about whether you want the possible consequences.
If you have already faced the consequences of bad mentoring, then I would advise you to go to a therapist and discuss the problems with him, since you may not be able to figure it out on your own.
I want to emphasize that being a mentor is much more responsible than many may think.
Remember the main thing. You are not becoming a mentor just to become one and scratch your ego. And certainly not to realize how cool and experienced you are compared to newcomers or juniors.
You are doing this to ensure high-quality knowledge transfer, to help your colleague become more self-confident and cope with tasks better. By the way, sometimes a strange stereotype is voiced, like, being a mentor and training someone in your own company = raising 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 believe that now he will definitely become the reason for your dismissal, I have bad news for you.
Source
And then 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 have now. And then there are people who have a hard time absorbing new information, they need to draw everything with squares and arrows, and sometimes more than once. And not twice.
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 the career path.
It is easy to be a bad mentor. It can be difficult to notice a bad mentor, he may seem good on the surface and not understand that he makes mistakes.
Mistakes are expensive
The relationship between a mentor and a student can be compared to the relationship between a parent and a child. Both the parent and the mentor have a great deal of influence, while both the student and the child may not realize or be aware of whether their mentor is good or bad.
Just as parental mistakes can follow a child throughout their life, mentoring mistakes can extend throughout their entire professional career. Mistakes of this kind are deep-seated, and it is not always possible to reliably determine their source.
I do not know how to cure these mistakes. The same long road as in the case of parents - awareness of the problem and subsequent self-control. Therefore, a mentor must understand and accept the share of responsibility placed on 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, you should never 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 a nobody and his name is Nothing.
Such a line of behavior is a direct path to the birth of a professional cripple.
This often happens if a person goes into mentoring with the goal of pumping up his ego against the background of younger, less professional colleagues, with the goal of showing them (and first of all, himself) how cool he is.
At the same time, I am not saying that you cannot go into mentoring for the sake of your ego, you can, of course, but only on the condition that your ego grows from the idea of teaching and learning, from the idea that excellent specialists come out from under your hand.
Overprotection
Overprotection is the same emotional damage as instilling a sense of inferiority.
When you are a mentor, your desire to see good results from your work may be expressed in the fact that you will succumb to the temptation to help your mentee too much, or even do everything for him, not allowing him to develop his own experience.
In such cases, there is a high chance that your student will end up dependent, disorganized and inexperienced. And if you are unlucky, he will not even realize it.
Thus, by overprotecting, you risk raising a person who, until the age of 40, will run to the team leader for any problem, even with the appropriate training, in the same way as people under 40 live with their parents because of the fear of independent life.
Let your students learn to solve problems themselves, and only when they understand that they are completely at a dead end, then come to their aid, suggesting further steps.
The student is not stupid
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 wonderful in its insidious cognitive distortion, familiar to many "the curse of knowledge". 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 it, you will encounter a complete misunderstanding. There can be many reasons for the misunderstanding, from banal complexity to the fact that your explanations are based on other things that first need to be understood.
Thus, it is easy to come to a situation when you are trying to explain something to a student, and he does not understand, then you begin to get irritated by this, and the student notices, understands your emotions, and the whole evening he will sit at home, listen to sad music and think that he is stupid and not suitable for the profession.
The cherry on the cake of consequences may be that at this moment you decide that you are also a lousy teacher.
And you just need to explain to yourself and your ward the essence of the phenomenon, tell them that this happens to everyone, that you shouldn't be afraid of it and draw conclusions based on it.
I personally remember very well how I couldn't understand the idea of asynchronicity, didn't understand what advantages it gives and what disadvantages. It was explained to me once, a second time, a third time. It seemed like I understood, but it was still very ambiguous.
But now, after some time, it seems clear, obvious and obvious to me.
Duckling syndrome
Another problem that follows from the previous ones. There is a wonderful phenomenon called the duckling syndrome. I am sure that almost everyone knows about it, but I will still explain: the duckling syndrome is a phenomenon in which a specialist considers the first technology or tool studied to be the best.
As a mentor, you are fully responsible for telling a new person in the profession that the world is not arranged like that, that all tools are useful and important, they all have their pros and cons, and you should not expect that your career path will always go with the same technologies at your side.
Otherwise, you will get another specialist who has signed up as an adherent of a tool or technology, and such people are not very popular, in fact, they often gather in groups and discuss that their programming language is the best, and other languages are envious. There
can be many of the above mistakes, these are only the most superficial ones, but despite this, they continue to be repeated and ruin people's careers.
These are things bad mentors do, but let's talk about what good mentors do.
Feedback
This is also quite an obvious thing, but not everyone realizes the importance of feedback.
Firstly, feedback is needed to prevent the mentee from making wrong conclusions. It works very simply - people tend to try to find an answer on their own within the unknown. A person with low self-esteem will probably find confirmation that he is doing poorly, that he is not coping and this profession is not for him. And vice versa, a person with high self-esteem can start to fly in the clouds and will stop developing based on the thoughts that he is already cool enough.
Secondly, the nature of the feedback should be selected strictly for the student. Shy people will find it difficult to react correctly to feedback in a meeting room in 1 on 1 conversations, and someone wants to receive feedback more formally in the form of a detailed letter, for someone correspondence in a messenger is enough, where you can normally think over the next words and hide your emotions, if any. Thirdly
, you, as a mentor, also need feedback. Maybe you need to develop your mentoring skills better somewhere, maybe the student sees something that you don’t.
It all revolves around a simple and clear principle – transparency. The more transparent your relationship is, the easier it is for all parties.
Progress tracking
Without taking into account progress, 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 the bad, so the result of your reflections on the topic of the student's successes may differ from the objective very much.
In addition, there is such a phenomenon as the brightness of the last memories in comparison with older ones, so a successfully completed stage or, conversely, a conflict, can provoke greater subjectivity of conclusions.
It is enough to simply keep a table where the student's tasks, your expectations and what happened in reality, and in general all personal impressions at each stage of each day of training will be described, this is very convenient for future analysis.
Revealing Expectations
Continuing the theme of developing maximum transparency in relationships.
Do not hide your expectations about your students' successes. 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 differ from the desired ones or not is a matter of luck.
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 think about whether you want the possible consequences.
If you have already faced the consequences of bad mentoring, then I would advise you to go to a therapist and discuss the problems with him, since you may not be able to figure it out on your own.
I want to emphasize that being a mentor is much more responsible than many may think.
Total
Remember the main thing. You are not becoming a mentor just to become one and scratch your ego. And certainly not to realize how cool and experienced you are compared to newcomers or juniors.
You are doing this to ensure high-quality knowledge transfer, to help your colleague become more self-confident and cope with tasks better. By the way, sometimes a strange stereotype is voiced, like, being a mentor and training someone in your own company = raising 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 believe that now he will definitely become the reason for your dismissal, I have bad news for you.
Source
