Member-only story
The importance of mentoring in engineering leadership — part 2
Welcome back to our series on the power of mentorship in engineering leadership. In Part 1, I shared my initial journey as a mentee. Now, I’ll share my path to becoming a mentor and how mentorship has influenced me while moving into a manager of managers role.
Becoming a Mentor Within My Company
After a few years of being a line manager, I understood the expectations for the role and felt ready to share my findings with others.
I got to participate in the same mentorship program I mentioned in the previous post but as a mentor this time. A new manager, eager to learn, asked me if I could mentor her. I was flattered by this request, a bit nervous, and curious to know her questions.
I remember vividly our first meeting. She had questions similar to mine when I became a manager. Her first question: “How do I know if I’m doing well as a manager?”. I remember bringing up my learnings from “High Output Management” - a classic management book written by Andy Grove — “you are evaluated mostly based on your team's output, so you need to make sure you enable your team to succeed. You need to balance technical excellence with people management and strategy execution”.
An unexpected question she posed was, “How do you manage someone more experienced…
