While over 76 percent of professionals consider mentors important, only 37 percent report that they currently have one.
That’s according to a recent study by Olivet Nazarene University, which aligns with a wealth of research revealing that people with mentors are happier and more productive at work. Closing the mentorship gap is a clear step toward supporting a professional culture of success.
At Acquia and Cohere Health, formal mentorship programs serve as a foundation to building leadership capacity and supporting organic development for their engineering teams.
“Mentoring is one of the best ways to grow internal talent, stretch people to think differently and motivate the team,” Alexis Schwabe, senior director of program management at Acquia, said. “Our mentorship program has sparked team members to be open to new perspectives, stretch for new opportunities or solutions and also grow within their careers.”
Andrew MacLeay, director of engineering at Cohere, agreed. “We’re developing a self-sustaining web of relationships,” he said. “When mentoring is done well, even the newest folks have the opportunity to develop their interpersonal and leadership skills.”
While goals and pathways to success vary from individual to individual, mentorship programs allow individuals to take on new responsibilities with support and find growth opportunities outside their current roles.
“All my previous employees who have invested the time in this mentorship have progressed to the next level of their career within 12 months,” Schwabe said.
Progression isn’t always linear, MacLeay added. At Cohere, the mentorship program offers opportunities for engineers to define their own career pathways. “We want to give them support to succeed and room to fail with grace,” he said.
Built In Boston spoke with Schwabe and MacLeay to learn more about how their mentorship programs are helping their teams grow across goals — from building expertise on their tech stack to stretching into new management roles.
Acquia is an open digital experience platform for Drupal.
What’s a practice your team follows that encourages a culture of mentorship and knowledge-sharing among your team members?
One of the most effective practices for knowledge sharing I have implemented in my teams is “best practice sharing meetings.” These are one-hour monthly meetings where a member of the team presents a topic that they have learned about people or tools or general tips and tricks. The individual presents why it should be implemented as a best practice on the team. The team then has a discussion about implementing it, and the presenter becomes the coach for the team on that new best practice. As topics arise, the team is encouraged to suggest topics or other team members for future sessions, while also encouraging new team members to become owners of best practices.
How do you, as a leader, serve as a mentor to members of your team?
Mentorship looks a little different than knowledge sharing for my teams. After discussing career, desires and motivations with my team, I like to match them with a mentor inside the organization. Depending on their interests, aspirations and cultural fit, I match them with a peer, senior leader or subject matter expert within the organization. I give my team members goals to achieve with their mentor and let the mentor know of these goals as well. Goals could range from learning the company’s tech stack to perfecting executive communications. I check in with the mentee and mentor every few weeks to see how things are progressing and ensure both parties are feeling positive about the interaction.
I feel mentorship can help women navigate the challenges they commonly face in the workforce.”
How has a mentorship culture helped your team grow?
Personally, as a leader, mentorship comes in many different forms. As a woman in tech, I put special emphasis on mentoring women early in their career. Through engineering school, many women are one in a room of many men and joining the workforce in tech is no different. I feel mentorship can help women navigate the challenges they commonly face in the workforce. I frequently reach out to women who are early in their careers to set up regular touch points to discuss the challenges they face, their success and support they need. As our Chief People Officer told me, “As women, we have to lift each other up.” Mentorship is one of the ways that we can do this.
Cohere Health builds software to streamline healthcare experiences and allow patients and doctors to focus on health and treatment.
What’s a practice your team follows that encourages a culture of mentorship and knowledge-sharing among your team members?
When we bring in a new initiative, all of the members of the team are involved in the early phases of solution design, and this practice is deeply ingrained in our culture. For instance, if it’s your second week at Cohere as a software engineer, you will be getting asked for thoughts and ideas on how to communicate intent to our users or measure whether a design is working — you are encouraged to propose a wholly different workflow if you think that might have some other benefits. And when it comes to implementation decisions, the engineers on the teams closest to the problems do that work too. No one is coming from on high to dictate technical decisions.
Mentorship in Cohere engineering is about giving every member of the team the opportunity to be a full partner in the process at every stage, and always encouraging them to take leadership opportunities. Our role at the director and manager level is to provide structure and support to ensure they’re successful.
How do you, as a leader, serve as a mentor to members of your team?
One of my primary responsibilities is working with people on our team to connect them with opportunities for growth and then to ensure they’re successful. This comes in many different forms, whether I’m helping them develop and nail down a big technical design decision or helping debug something.
My favorite, though, and the most impactful over time, is identifying unique roles that team members can take on in order to build responsibility and agency in the team. Whenever a new need arises which needs some kind of long-term ownership, like running tech training for new hires, we’ll assign the responsibility for handling that whole process to a team member. That person will be the face of the initiative, define the goals and procedures and coordinate to make sure it gets done. In the case of onboarding training, it goes to another level — the person running it is also going to be mentoring a group of people to continually run onboarding and improve training over time.
You need to encourage steps on that journey, even when it doesn’t follow a straight line.”
How has a mentorship culture helped your team grow?
Cohere is very much a startup, and the kind of place where we can only be really successful by constantly taking on new challenges individually and collectively. That means letting people take on responsibilities that will stretch them as a person and engineer. We’ve had a few engineers take on management responsibilities for the first time. For some, it was a perfect fit, but we’ve also had engineers find out that managing was a drain on them and return to being an individual contributor. We’ve also had a few new engineers take the role of tech lead on a new team. For some it fit like a glove, and we found out they thrive making the people around them more effective. For others, the new parts of the job took away from the enjoyment they got out of their day-to-day work, and they passed the torch to someone else. Every engineer’s career is a journey, and if you want the engineers on your team to maximize their opportunities to grow as people and practitioners, you need to encourage steps on that journey — even when it doesn’t follow a straight line.
