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 Cohere Health, formal mentorship programs serve as a foundation to building leadership capacity and supporting organic development for their engineering teams.
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.
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 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.
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.
