Power-levelling the padawans

Power-leveling the padawans
How to mentor someone 1:1, developing people without creating clones of yourself

Leaders have a responsibility to find and train new leaders. This talk is about how to power-level those potential leaders without turning them into a clone army.

Transcript

1. Power-leveling the padawans Alison Hawke
2. What’s a padawan? “A Padawan is a learner or apprentice. The term can refer specifically to a Jedi apprentice within the Star Wars universe. It can also be used more generally to refer to a trainee, a beginner, or an inexperienced person.” https://www.dictionary.com/e/fictional-characters/padawan/ 2
3. Progress with and without a boost 3 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Skills Time Solo Mentored
4. Blueprint for Jedi Masters Why mentor someone? How do you find a victim padawan? Power-levelling via questions What happened with my science experiment Resource links and a kitten picture 4
5. Why bother with power-levelling? Buy or build? Who do you work with next year? Teach them to fish, or… 5
6. My science experiment Take your 3 years experience and add my 10 years experience Where do we end up in a year? 6
7. I’m not the boss of you You don’t have to be a boss to mentor Mentoring is NOT about you 7
8. Finding a padawan To teach someone, you need to be a half-step ahead of them And maintain that half-step 8
9. Tell me what you want, what you really, really, want Does the potential padawan want to join this experiment? Are they aware they can say yes or no? And both answers are OK? 9
10. Should I stay or should I go now? Sometimes you’re not the right mentor for this person That is OK Help them find someone better suited 10
11. Power-levelling 101 Good one to one meetings Homework assignments Avoiding the cloning vats 11
12. Be a coach, not a lecturer Lecturers dispense solid blocks of information Coaches inquire, guide, and nudge 12
13. Good 1:1 meetings Start with, “Hi! What’s on your mind today?” Then say, “And what else?” until they run out of stuff (from Michael Bungay Stanier, “The Coaching Habit”) 13
14. Starting words Say “I don’t know, how do you think you could make this better?” Even if you know the fix. Especially if you know the fix 14
15. More starting words Say “What are your options here?” Help them figure out all the potential options 15
16. Other starting words Say “What’s the worst that could happen?” Make a disaster-recovery plan 16
17. Even more starting words Say “What do you want to happen here?” Plan how to get there 17
18. Finally, ask permission to advise “May I make a suggestion?” “I have a couple of ideas” 18
19. Encourage disagreement Model healthy conflict with conversational sparring Adopt an opinion you KNOW they disagree with and get them to talk you out of it 19
20. Deal with failure Most people are terrified of making a mistake Reduce this fear this by sharing your own failures 20
21. Experiments never fail You just get data you weren’t expecting So you make a new experiment 21
22. Set small homework tasks Watch the movie Deep Blue Sea (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149261/ Report back on how Team Human approaches things vs how Team Shark operates 22
23. Bring them on as equals Have a ‘reverse 1:1’ where they guide you Do what they suggest and report back Ask their opinion on your stuff 23
24. Avoid the cloning vats Compare ideas but don’t rate theirs as less than yours Don’t lead with “What I’d do here is…” 24
25. Other bad models You decide what they need to learn, not them It’s about you, not them 25
26. The success story Step 1: January 2015, started weekly 1:1 sessions Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit! November 2019, co-director of QA 26
27. What really happened Started out by talking about his project After a year or so, he thought about moving project So I moved him to a new project 27
28. Stuff I had problems with He looked away while talking and listening I had to adjust my expectations 28
29. Give permission Arrived in a panic, “I’ve made a huge mistake” Figured out a quick action to improve things, “Go do that" 29
30. Be vulnerable When’s the last time you sent your boss home? Book study, take notes and swap them 30
31. Tea, La Croix, and kombucha I drank tea, he likes La Croix (the ghost of flavours past) He tried my tea, I tried his kombucha. 31
32. Drive it like you stole it Shared food is the basis of civilization. Take a lunch offsite “I’ll drive” 32
33. Padawans become Jedi Build the people you want to work with Teach them to fish for themselves Do some reverse-mentoring so they can train a padawan too 33
34. Resources link and bonus kitten picture 34