Mentor, coach, sponsor a guide to developing engineers - Neha Batra

This resource first appeared in issue #64 on 05 Mar 2021 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals

Mentor, coach, sponsor: a guide to developing engineers - Neha Batra

A good overview of the different ways we can contribute to a team member’s development:

Mentoring: sharing your experience so an engineer can leverage it themselves. Coaching: asking the right questions to help an engineer reach a solution that works for them. Sponsoring: giving stretch projects or opportunities to help an engineer grow.

Of these, mentorship is the least valuable - our experience may or may not transfer over. Working with our team members to help them solve the problem (coaching), and explicitly making room for them to learn new things (sponsoring) ask more from us, but have better results and are higher leverage by helping them grow further, faster.

Batra works through some examples of what the three might look like, from submitting a talk to getting more visibility in the organization.