Think like a mentor: help solve problems without giving advice nobody asked for
Let’s imagine someone close to you is complaining about problems at work. Or a friend has paid for expensive courses but feels like they’ve hit a wall and the money has gone to waste. You want to help that person, but how: do you give advice or just show compassion?
A better way is to ask the right questions and help the person find the answer themselves. At first, this may sound like nothing new or complex. In reality, this practice is called mentorship.
Mentorship is an essential part of the educational platform Practicum by Yandex which helps students get ready for the workplace. Our developers over at Yandex become the mentors for students in tech fields.
In this article, Mila and other mentors share how you can become a mentor while studying new skills, in your workplace, and in your everyday life.
Helping others find answers independently
A mentor is a person who helps someone else solve a problem or learn something new. These challenges can be of all sorts: navigating relationships, advancing a career, or studying a new skill.
When someone hits a wall, giving them advice usually pushes them to snap back, “You don’t understand!” It’s great when there’s someone close by who isn’t trying to push their opinion and just asks the right questions. It’s as if they feel which questions will nudge that person towards the right thoughts. That’s what mentors do.
Large companies often practice mentorship when educating new employees. Let’s say a new programmer joins the team: they’ve finished studying, but they’ve never actually worked in this field before. During work, they are met with unexpected problems and don’t know how to approach them. They try once, twice, and then just give up.
This is where a more experienced worker comes in. They don’t come barging in solving tasks for the newcomer, but rather start with questions: “What is it exactly that’s not working? What do you want as a result?” That’s the way someone learns how to solve problems.
LinkedIn made a video about how workers adapt to mentorship techniques.
A mentor helps people grow by changing their ways of thinking. Mentors empower people to:
● Learn how to solve problems independently
● Take responsibility for their actions
● Use critical thinking
● Ask themselves and others the right questions
● Negotiate with other people
● Approach problem solving creatively, and invent unique solutions
Mentorship can be applied not only to learning new skills but also to life as a whole. Everyone has been a mentor at least once.
Here’s a typical scenario: your friend is talking about how they’re fed up with work, constantly staying late, and have a low salary. You can give obvious advice — “Find a new job!” — or you can just listen quietly. That will either lead your friend to protest, or it won’t work at all.
Someone who’s thinking like a mentor will start off with questions: “What is it that you don’t like about the job? What would you want to do? What kind of work brings you joy? What do you see as your ideal job?”
During the conversation, your friend will likely have some ideas about how to get out of their pickle. That’s called insight, and it helps a person take control of their trajectory in life.
If someone doesn’t really want to change their job, a person thinking like a mentor will see that and show some sympathy, or just talk with them about the situation at work.
To become a mentor, you don’t have to perfect or get the right diploma. All it takes is being a step ahead of your student. Let’s show how to do this when studying.
If a person knows a foreign language at an intermediate level, they can become a mentor for someone who’s just starting out. That doesn’t mean they have to supervise the learning process for the student or check their vocabulary. The mentor’s task is to show the student how to keep studying each day and not give up, even if they’re tired and overloaded at work.
A mentor has a head start on their students and sees the nearest areas where they can connect. This connection fuels student’s development.
Learning how to help
Mentors have several principles when working with students. These same principles can be applied when studying, helping close friends with their problems, and supporting newcomers at work:
Don’t judge personality. A mentor doesn’t make any judgments on a student’s personality, only on their behavior. A mentor doesn’t say, “The student is angry.” They say, “The student is behaving like such and such.” If a mentor sees incorrect behavior, they bring it to the student’s attention: “I can see that you don’t want to do that. Can you tell me why?”
Don’t push or traumatize. A mentor doesn’t try to push their own opinion forward and doesn’t consider themselves correct. They help choose the option that will work best for the person they’re helping, not for themselves.
For example, imagine that the student is stuck on a tough problem. A mentor could just say: “Hey, this is easy. You just have to do this and that. Why aren’t you doing what I told you to?” But this approach will likely only cause the student to withdraw and not wish to talk to the mentor again.
In this situation, it’s best not to offer ready-made solutions, but to ask questions like, “What is causing you problems? How do you think this should be solved? Where can you find the solution?”
Don’t try to be an encyclopedia. A mentor doesn’t do the work for their students. Their mission is to teach students to work independently and figure things out in new situations. That’s why they don’t offer the solutions, but ask suggestive questions and explain what they would try in a similar situation: “Look, I don’t know how to solve this either. I would try this and that. Do you think you could try something like this?”
How to give better feedback[AK4]
Usually, when a person sees someone make mistakes, they give advice or criticize. This hurts the individual who’s made the mistake, and they withdraw. Typically, people don’t criticize because they’re rude — they just don’t know other ways of giving feedback.
A mentor moves away from traumatizing statements like, “Why can’t you just do it? That’s so easy,” and introduces sympathy and compassion: “Let’s think about how I could help you in this.”
In Practicum, when studying mentorship, developers participate in an exercise like this:
People are sitting in a circle looking at each other. Each one says a fact, thought, emotion, or judgment about another. Fact: “You’re wearing yellow boots.” Thought: “That’s extravagant.” Emotion “I’m surprised.” Judgment: “I think that’s silly.” Many would-be mentors are surprised when they realize how different these statements are. This exercise helps aspiring mentors learn how to communicate feedback through facts and observations, without adding their own opinions and judgments.
When people study mentorship, it becomes their way of thought. They have a hard time imagining they’ve ever criticized or given traumatic feedback in the past. They have an easier time handling relationships and solving their problems. By teaching others, they learn themselves.
I want to become a mentor. What should I do?
Becoming a mentor isn’t just about taking some courses. It takes changing your way of thinking. Here are three steps to get you started:
Keep track of your desire to criticize. Criticism is a perfectly normal reaction when someone sees something they consider wrong. However, feedback like that can harm people and damage relationships. Getting rid of criticism overnight is tough, so start off with just noticing when that feeling appears. The process looks like this: you catch yourself wanting to criticize → ask yourself why → try to understand what you were trying to achieve.
Transform criticism of personality into a description of behavior. Usually, people criticize because they want to help someone. However, criticizing personality hurts people; the best alternative is to focus on describing behavior. Ask yourself these questions:
● What is it that I don’t like?
● Is this about the person or their behavior?
● What do I want to achieve with my criticism?
Usually, people make mistakes not out of ill intent, but because they don’t know any better. Try to change your point of view from “They’re a bad programmer” to “They make a lot of mistakes when writing code.”
Ask questions instead of giving advice. When you figure out a person’s motivations, your first impulse will be to give them advice. It’s best not to do that, even if you know the solution. Even someone close can withdraw from unwanted advice. Instead of saying, “You need to learn how to prioritize your tasks,” it’s best to ask questions: “Why do you think you’re not keeping up with your work? What would help you?” Thanks to these questions, a person can find a way out independently.
Learning how to be a mentor means hard work with yourself. You can’t just stop criticizing in a flash and start asking questions instead of giving advice in a single day. What’s most important for your mentorship process is keeping track of what’s going on as you progress. That’s how old habits get replaced with new ones.
To find a mentor who can help you advance your career, explore the options at Practicum by Yandex
