Focus Your Growth by Giving and Receiving Mentoring

Once you are part of a community, the value of helping others and of being helped becomes clear. We cannot become our best alone. Giving and receiving mentoring is an awesome way to connect more deeply with peers. This chapter will show you how to do it.

In this chapter, we will explain a couple of concepts vital to understanding the role mentoring has in your career. These concepts are that it takes a village to build a developer, and mentoring is not a one-way street. You will also learn how to be selective and intentional in your mentoring relationships, how to find a mentor, and how to be a good mentor.

The main topics of this chapter are the following:

• It takes a village to build a developer
• Mentoring is not a one-way street
• Being selective and intentional
• Finding a good mentor
• Being a good mentor

By the end of the chapter, you will understand the need for mentorship and peer coaching, be...

Different types of mentoring

There are many types of mentoring, from sporadic advice and Q&A sessions to a more hands-on, daily approach. But they all center around the mentor being part of the mentee experience, be it by listening and understanding the situation and provoking thought and mentality changes, providing advice and guidance, helping with course correction, or helping with avoidance and recovery from mistakes.

In mentoring, we learn from each other. Whether it is peer to peer, pair programming, community activities, or formal mentoring, we learn by working together. Mentoring gives us access to people that have more knowledge or experience and can give us the information, training, and skills that we need to succeed.

Making the decision to work with a mentor gives you a chance to create relationships with other developers that can help you or may need your help. Mentoring builds friendships, connections, and communities. Mentoring is also the best way to transfer...

Mentoring is not a one-way street

Since mentoring is so important, we may imagine that, as developers, we need to be mentored. Often, we forget that we can also mentor. The relationship formed between mentee and mentor can be an amazing one. When you do things with your mentor, it will form a stronger bond in your relationship. You can plan personal or virtual events with your mentor – take a walk or have a walking meeting, have a coffee, enjoy a meal together, or watch a movie together.

When searching for a mentor, it is easy to imagine that they will help us, but mentorship is a two-way street. A reality of career evolution is that helping others helps you too. When your mentor is working with you and helping you advance, you are helping your mentor improve their own skills. Mentoring is a required skill for leadership! Because of the mutual benefits, the relationship between mentor and mentee can become strong and fruitful.

Friends have fun together, but that is only...

Be selective and intentional

Although mentoring is a great tool for improvement and growth, it is not only a “feel-good” activity where you do it because it is fun and you will feel great about it (although it can be a lot of fun at times). Mentoring is challenging work for both sides, and it requires a big effort in time and commitment. You should use it to improve in specific areas.

It is easy to consider mentoring as just a conversation or to build a relationship with your mentor and confuse it with friendship, but being mentored is hard. A good mentor will push your limits so you can succeed faster and grow further. That is stressful, and often, your mentor will possibly end up annoying you with tough questions and criticism, making you see the truth that you are trying to ignore (or hide even from yourself).

A good mentor will push you to do things you are not comfortable with – things that are outside of your comfort zone. One of the hardest parts of...

How to select a mentor

Write out your goals for your career and make sure they are SMARTER. This will help you to understand where you have gaps in achieving your goals and help you to see where you could use mentorship. Some examples are to develop new skills, expand your network in a specific industry sector, or build confidence to have some difficult conversations. Once your goals are outlined and you have identified your gaps, think about how a mentor could help you to achieve your goals. Create a specific plan or description of how they could help you, whether it is working on a certain project, introducing you to their network, or coaching you on how to have a particular conversation that is hindering your success. Next, you can start to search your network. Consider people you have met at events or conferences, through current or previous roles, from your academic career, or even second-degree connections. Look for someone who fits the description or has the skills you are...

Finding a good mentor

Mentors can be found in many places, among your friends, work colleagues, people in the industry, teachers, and many more possibilities. There are the steps to finding a good mentor:

• Be clear on what you want to accomplish
• Look for someone that has done what you are trying to do
• Look for someone that you trust or admire
• Look for someone that is willing to build a relationship with you

Let’s look at these steps in detail:

Step 1 – be clear on what you want to accomplish

Because mentorship is better if you are trying to grow or improve a specific situation, it is important that you are incredibly clear about what you want to accomplish. Finding a mentor that will help you achieve what you want will make the entire process a lot more interesting for you both. Go after your big dreams and find a mentor that will help you accomplish a specific thing that you want and create the motivation for you to face the challenges...

Be the best mentee for your mentor

A good mentee will pay close attention and will work on the things that need to be worked on. A good mentee will do things to get closer to the mentor and will want to do things with the mentor... as much as possible, of course! You want to be appropriate and respectful, not overly demanding of your mentor. Strive to be the best mentee to your mentor by doing the things suggested, applying the things you need to apply, and asking questions. Also, be helpful to your mentor. Help your mentor achieve things they want and work on their projects as well. The closer the relationship that you build with your mentor, the more results you are going to have in your own life. And once your mentorship arrangement comes to a close, you should continue to say thanks every so often when you think of them. This goes both ways – when you have given and received mentorship, sending a note of thanks and appreciation can deepen the trust and connection in your...

Being a good mentor – you can mentor people too!

Now that you know how to be mentored and once you have gained some experience in this process and built a mentor relationship, think about how you could mentor other people. There are some guidelines to keep in mind when you are ready to start mentoring people.

Here are five things to consider while mentoring people:

• Build experience: mentors do best when they have done it
• Be one step ahead of your mentees
• Listen, listen, listen
• Mentors are not coaches: help direct their efforts
• Mentors are not teachers: help them do it in real life

Mentoring is not only great for the mentee. It is also helpful for the mentor. When you teach, you better understand what you are teaching, and that helps you deepen your knowledge of the things that you are good at. When you mentor others, you are trying to help them do what you have already done. It motivates you to keep growing toward your own goals. A mentor also...

Interview

Elder Moraes

Q: Can you tell us where you work now?

A: Currently, I work at Red Hat, having moved there from Oracle in early 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. My role at Red Hat involves leading the Red Hat developers for Latin America, where I work with the Latin community, delivering Spanish content and talks.

Q: Do you speak Spanish?

A: Yes, I do. When I was interviewed for my current role, my boss asked me if I could speak Spanish, and I had to learn. It was not too difficult as Spanish is a close language to Portuguese, which is my native language.

Q: How did you first get involved with the Java community?

A: In around 2015, I discovered a group in Brazil that was discussing Java on IRC called SouJava. I contacted the group, and a year later, I was working with Bruno Souza when he asked me to help promote the release of Java EE 8. We ended up conducting a series of interviews with prominent figures in the Java community, which brought me to author...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the need for mentorship and peer coaching. You can now identify the types of mentors and coaches you require, what is needed in mentoring relationships (giving and getting), how to be intentional in your interactions with mentors, how to find mentors, and how to mentor other people.

Next, we will discuss how to operate in larger groups and how to interact with people via meetups and user group meetings.