Mentoring Systems Within the Community

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 3:29 PM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Walter Lapchynski <wxl at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> From: "Elizabeth K. Joseph" <lyz at ubuntu.com>
>>> Mentoring needs to go both ways, every one of my mentees
>>> has helped me in some way and many continue to today even though
>>> they've moved on from the relationship in the mentor-mentee capacity.
>>> The successful mentoring relationships that came out of BT that elfy
>>> have noted had this quality.
>>
>> Could you guys offer some examples?
>
> Looking at Ubuntu specifically, benefits to mentors include:
>
>  - Shifting/reducing workload of mentor once mentee is up to speed.
>  - Helping the mentor become more familiar with subject matter by
> teaching it, and having a mentee who learns related things and shares
> them with the mentor - everyone learns!
>  - Mentees can offer fresh perspectives in the safe space of the
> mentor-mentee relationship, when combined the mentor's influence in
> the project and experience can help improve on and innovate in the
> project more quickly than either could do alone.
>  - Networking. This is huge, some mentees go on to do amazing things
> and many of us have built our hobbies and/or careers around open
> source and the communities therein. We all want to succeed and do well
> in what we spend our time with, and luck and opportunities rarely make
> themselves. Personal connections help tremendously and the
> mentor-mentee bond is a strong one.
>
> These reasons are similar to why mentoring is so important in
> professional careers.
>
> Of course not all relationships yield this, and it does feel nice to
> help someone for a while even if it ultimately doesn't work out, but
> it's the potential and value of successful mentorships that keep many
> of us at it :)
>
>> Another question related to this: does it NEED to benefit you? Is the
>> building up of people not benefit enough? I mean this is what support
>> folks do all the time.
>
> As much as I wish that it was all driven by altruism in the long term,
> I have to look at the results in programs I've participated in. The
> burnout rate of mentors who don't get anything out of a relationship
> is high, some refuse to mentor anyone ever again after a bad pairing
> or two. So I believe yes, there does need to benefit the mentor in
> some form that is valuable to them.
>
> Support folks burn out too, but they're solving a variety of problems
> for lots of people, not one-on-one all the time with a single user
> (unless they're being paid to, but I'm talking about volunteers here).
> More importantly, they can also turn it off at any time without
> consequence if they need to take a few weeks (or months, years) off.
> When you have a needy mentee you can't do this. Even with a good, self
> sufficient, mentee you need to make arrangements if you need a break.

I see no either/or choice between altruism and an exchange in
mentoring. One of the best mentors I've known recruits "minions" who
want to do what he does (packaging). Once they are working well on
their own, guess what their next big task is?

That's right, recruiting their own minion. He offers encouragement to
them to do this for multiple reasons. The first is that teaching
someone else is the best way to strengthen your own skills. This seems
to work on both the technical and the personal level. The next is that
this is the right way to grow the team. Finally, it creates strong
bonds which last for years.

Valorie