TSQLTuesday #184: Mentoring and Sponsorship

This is my 12th TSQLTuesday, and this month Deborah Melkin has given the topic “mentorship and sponsorship”, and encouraged us to talk about our relationship to both.

I’ve had a few people I would consider mentors or sponsors over the years, mostly they have been either line managers or senior members of the team. I’m going to talk about all of them first, and then go into a couple of other relationships towards the end of this post.

Informal work mentorship

The mentor relationships I’ve had have mostly been quite similar, and very informal. Usually a manager or senior dev takes an interest in my progression, and starts to push me to do more. If they are someone I have 1:1s with then these tend to become quite in-depth, or go on longer than they do for most other people. I might start to get more responsibility, or be encouraged to speak up in meetings, or share my thoughts in private. Occasionally I’ve been sent on training courses, or given reading material, or pointed in the direction of online resources. None of these relationships were formalised, and mostly they weren’t even talked about, but with this prompt making me think about these things I can look back and identify the managers who behaved like mentors and the ones who didn’t.

Interestingly, whenever I had a manager who behaved like this, the job is one I view as important in my career. In contrast, when I look back at the jobs where I didn’t have this kind of mentorship and they tend to be much more of the “just in it for the money” type roles. Mainly because of this, I tended to work harder and push for more improvements in the jobs where I had someone pushing me to improve myself, partially because I felt like I owed more but also because the job just felt better.

This kind of informal mentor can also act as a sponsor, in the same informal way. My experience of this has mostly been of the sponsor acting as a sounding board for any proposals I have, using 1:1s or other meetings to refine them, and supporting them when I suggest them to the rest of the team.

Times when I’ve acted as a mentor

As my career has gone on, there have been times when I’ve acted as a mentor myself. This has usually been to junior members of the team, and has mostly been helping them with technical aspects of their work. I think I’ve done a decent job in terms of explaining the technical side of things, and have hopefully pushed them to look at the bigger picture a bit more. I’m someone who thinks a lot about the overall system, and how my particular bit of code will fit, and how we can avoid code duplication, etc. and I’ve tried to encourage that kind of thinking in the developers I’ve (informally) mentored.

Where I think I’ve maybe fallen down a bit is in helping them develop the soft skills that come with this job, by that I mean things like navigating office politics, or how to get good requirements from a client, or how to push back on a work request. If I’m lucky enough to end up in that sort of situation again, I will try to do better there.

New Stars of Data

I’ve also had one formal mentor in my career. A few years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, I applied to speak at New Stars of Data. This is an online conference for people who haven’t spoken before, and everyone who is accepted gets an experienced speaker to mentor them through the process. I had some small experience of presenting on different topics to some of my teams in my day job, but nothing like a conference presentation, so I was pretty thrilled to get accepted. My mentor was Rob Sewell, who was amazing (and a little terrifying at times). We had weekly meetings where I would go through where I was in the presentation and get feedback, and I came away from each of those sessions with a better presentation than I had at the start, and I feel confident I delivered a good presentation at the end.

I think the reason those sessions were so productive was honesty. Rob was always encouraging, but he would also always call out anything he saw as a problem. This took a minute to get used to, but once I adjusted to it I found it pushed me to be better in a way that someone tiptoeing around criticism wouldn’t have.

Final thoughts

This has been a bit of a rambling tour through my past experiences, so I’m going to try and pull it together here.

A lot of times a mentor/mentee relationship can happen informally, and it’s not unusual for one or both sides to not really realise this is happening, but these relationships still provide a lot of value for both sides. For the mentee they get the benefit of experience and the support of someone more senior on the team or in management, and for the mentor they get to be challenged by their mentee. I have found nothing sharpens my understanding of something more than having to explain it to someone, and answer their questions.

If you want to generate these kind of relationships (from either side) then my advice is to push for them. If you are more experienced then keep your eyes open for the more junior members of the team who want to learn, and offer to help them. If you’re less experienced then keep asking about how you can learn more, or if you want more of a sponsor-type relationship then start suggesting new ideas. In almost every company I’ve been at I’ve made sure to engage with my manager and senior devs about how we can do better in the team, and to make it clear that I want to improve as an employee and expand my skill set. At worst it’s been largely ignored, but the best jobs I’ve had have been where someone has engaged with what I’m saying and encouraged me to speak up, go forward, and be better.