{"id":4872,"date":"2018-02-06T09:24:36","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T17:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/3.209.169.194\/blogs\/paul\/?p=4872"},"modified":"2018-02-06T09:24:36","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T17:24:36","slug":"setting-mentoring-ground-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/setting-mentoring-ground-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting mentoring ground rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">One of the things I always recommend in the first newsletter of each year is to try to get a mentor. On the flip side of that is that one of the most rewarding things you can do in your professional life is to *be* a mentor to one or more people. I mentored\u00a0more than 50 people back in 2015, and I think I&#8217;m going to do some more mentoring, starting in the Spring (watch the blog for details &#8211; but definitely not 50 again!).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">If you&#8217;re going to be a mentor, I think it&#8217;s very important to set ground rules. One of my mentees from 2015 just sent me email saying he&#8217;s going to be mentoring this year (*so* cool to see people paying it forward!) and asking about the ground rules I set.\u00a0I&#8217;ve been mentoring people for almost 20 years and I think you need to cover at least:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How communication will work, and expectations on both sides for how long a response may take<\/li>\n<li>How to end the relationship<\/li>\n<li>Which areas are fair game, and which aren&#8217;t (e.g. I wouldn&#8217;t answer SQL Server questions with the 2015 group)<\/li>\n<li>Statement of confidentiality and trust<\/li>\n<li>What actions will cause the relationship to end<\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\">How not to react to things I&#8217;ll say (e.g. I&#8217;m very blunt and honest &#8211; the whole point of a mentoring relationship is clear feedback)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That way there&#8217;s no ambiguity and you both know how things are going to work.<\/p>\n<p>As an example, here&#8217;s the set of rules I sent to all my mentees to &#8216;ok&#8217; before I&#8217;d move forward with them:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>Lots of housekeeping, ground rules, and expectation setting in this email so PLEASE read through this email and let me know whether you&#8217;re comfortable with everything I say below. If not, for any reason, just say so (you don&#8217;t need to say why) and we&#8217;ll walk away with no hard feelings. I also need to know that you&#8217;re getting my emails. Once I hear back from you, I&#8217;ll send the kick-off part 2 email.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>As I mentioned in the original blog post, I do all mentoring over email. I have two reasons for that:<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px; text-align: justify;\"><em>It makes the whole process asynchronous, which means there&#8217;s no immediate pressure to respond and so is easier on us all. It also means we can think about responses for a week or two, and that&#8217;s especially useful as I&#8217;ve got several long trips without Internet this year.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px; text-align: justify;\"><em>I really don&#8217;t like talking on the phone. Phones are a necessary evil, but they don&#8217;t make for well-though-out discussions.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>Once I&#8217;ve had a response from you so I know my email&#8217;s getting through, whenever I send an email out, I won&#8217;t chase you up to reply to it. If you go dark for, say, a month, I&#8217;ll assume you&#8217;re no longer interested or you&#8217;re done with mentoring. I&#8217;d appreciate a note to that effect if you decide that though, so we get a positive closure.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>You can expect responses from me within a week or two. If a longer response will be delayed, I&#8217;ll let you know. If it goes more than two weeks and you haven&#8217;t heard from me about a reply, please ping me as your email might have been lost or (rarely) I might have accidentally deleted or mis-filed it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>I take all mentoring relationships seriously, and I expect you to as well. You&#8217;re going to be opening up and telling me things about yourself that you might not share\/have shared with anyone else (such as hopes, failures, negatives, positives, weaknesses, strengths, work problems, family problems, whatever). Anything you tell me will remain strictly between us, and only us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>You can publicize whatever you want about the mentoring relationship and any advice I give you, unless I (rarely) tell you something is in confidence.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>Do not tell me anything that is illegal or unethical (e.g. you cheated on a certification) &#8211; that will cause me to end the mentoring relationship immediately. No second chances on this. If there&#8217;s something we&#8217;re discussing that is making me uncomfortable, I&#8217;ll let you know.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>I will not discuss politics or religion 1-1 through email. Sheep, diving, and electronics are fair game though :-)<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>We&#8217;re going to get to know each other better over the rest of this year. Feel free to Facebook friend me if you want &#8211; no pressure &#8211; I don&#8217;t care either way, but some people don&#8217;t like to presume to ask.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>I will be blunt and honest with you; I don&#8217;t sugar-coat things. You&#8217;ve probably already seen that from me on Twitter and on my blog. Getting straight to the point in any discussion is the easiest way to get a point across clearly and with little or no ambiguity. Please don&#8217;t ever take anything I say to you as trying to be nasty, belittling, or destructive criticism &#8211; that&#8217;s not how I work or who I am. The whole point of a mentoring relationship is to be constructive, so please take everything I say with that in mind. If you find yourself having a hard time with that, let me know and we can work on that too. And feel free to disagree with anything I say too, you won&#8217;t offend me.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>As I mentioned in the original post, this isn&#8217;t about me answering SQL Server questions for you. That&#8217;s what forums, Twitter, etc are for. Although I can help you figure out how to grow skills, this isn&#8217;t a mostly technical conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>This may seem like a lot of rules, but I&#8217;m very easy going. At the same time I like to have expectations set and ground rules agreed to so we all know where we stand &#8211; this is a big time investment from all of us, so it pays to get everything out in the open right at the start.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>If that all sounds cool to you, let me know and I&#8217;ll send the second part of the kick off.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: justify;\"><em>Thanks!<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Feel free to use any or all of this if you&#8217;re going to be a mentor, or ask for something like this if you&#8217;re going to be a mentee.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The main thing to bear in mind is that both mentoring and being a mentee should be rewarding, and not feel like a chore or a slog. Setting some rules up front will help define the relationship and provide a clear way to end it if things aren&#8217;t going well.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the things I always recommend in the first newsletter of each year is to try to get a mentor. On the flip side of that is that one of the most rewarding things you can do in your professional life is to *be* a mentor to one or more people. I mentored\u00a0more than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Setting mentoring ground rules - Paul S. Randal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/setting-mentoring-ground-rules\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Setting mentoring ground rules - Paul S. 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