How do you mentor junior employees?

Situation:

• My passion has always been teaching. I enjoy teaching.
• In fact, I’ve considered being a professor when I retire
• Before I became a team lead, I had to show my managers that I am capable of teaching, training and mentoring junior to senior level employees that joined my team.

Problem:

• My team supports 3 major products and we are busy all the time.
• It’s not possible to simply handover work to new members.
• And, it’s not easy to dedicate time to simply go over everything

Solution:

• The best way to solve this problem was to include the new member when any of us are debugging something.
• Say you are trying to figure out why the health check is failing.
• As you debug, I told my team to include the new team member on a call.
• Other times, we let the new team member watch us make a change in one of the lower environments and ask the new member to perform the change in other lower environments.
• I think the best way to learn is by doing - especially in the lower environments.

Impact:

• If done right, you can see the impact within 3 weeks.
• The goal is to have the new team member add value as fast as possible.

Lesson:

• One lesson to take away is that, you should have a lot of patience while training new members.
• A crucial part of mentoring is breaking things down into its simplest form.
• You have to always think from the person’s point of view and assume they don’t know.