 We have Ben Gordon talking about best practices for formal mentorship program. Ben is Fedora's program manager But does at least 10,000 different things because he is three parts in a trench coat I'll pass it on to you then. I believe this is great. Hi Thank you, Vipple, and I want to thank all the other organizers and volunteers who made this happen I know this is something we've talked about in Fedora for a long time I'd also like to give a special shout out to Mike McGrath for his keynote yesterday Which caused me to go back and edit some additional content into my slides. So thanks for your leadership there, Mike Usually when I give a talk, I like to start off with some housekeeping. So we'll do that here You see my pronouns the license if you have kind things to say about the talk There's my Twitter handle. If you have unkind things to say you're welcome to keep those to yourself I hope we have time for lots of questions and interactions, but I would like to keep questions at the end Just so we can kind of get through it And of course the disclaimer here is that I am not an expert. I have done I've participated in a lot of mentoring programs formally as a mentor and as a mentee This is a collection of the things that I found that work really well I have not put a lot of academic study into it And I'm not necessarily the best at practicing these sometimes it's a little aspirational The talk was sort of the title was sort of given to me I might have said okayist practices for formal mentorship programs the word best practices always puts on a lot of pressure But here we go. Let's get into it. So I wanted to start it out with a few principles These are not really things that you can act on exactly just things to keep in mind As you're participating as a mentor in a mentoring program and the thing that has been most important to me Is that it's not about you as the mentor? I always tell my mentees like look if our meetings are you just sitting there staring blankly at me and me staring They're blankly back at you because that's what you need out of the meeting. That's what we'll do So You're you have to be flexible and meet what your mentee needs from you You're not there to shape them into a smaller version of you which I think most people don't do that intentionally You know, they're trying to be like, oh, here's the things that you can emulate from my success but your mentee is a different person and It's tempting a lot of times to try to make them into You but smaller But that's not how really it works and You don't have to know everything that your mentee needs from you But you should be able to find the resources for them get them connected to the right information Sometimes it's just that you've got more experience doing Google or Bing or duck. Go or you know, whatever search is And so you just know how to find the thing that they've spent some time looking for One thing one story I like to tell in the it's not about you framing is I had a mentor or mentee in red hats mentorship program and He was pretty excited. You know, he was fairly early in his career. He wanted to build his reputation internally He wanted to really make a name for himself Both in red hat and out in the community that he worked in And so as we talked a little bit I was like, hey, are you interested in like writing articles for open source calm? Because that's something I have a lot of experience with and I think I'm actually pretty good at and if that's interesting to you Then I can really be a good help with you for that and he said yes He was really excited about it. So for our first few meetings, we started working through like, all right What are you going to talk about? How are you going to explain it? You know, what message are you trying to convey some of the basics of, you know, writing articles for a website? And that was in early 2020 and So, you know what comes next, right? The pandemic happened And all of a sudden everybody's sent home basically just sort of trapped in their their little houses and this gentleman in particular What was living in the Boston area? But his he was from the Middle East and so most of his family was an ocean plus away And he had no opportunity to see them and granted it wasn't like he was going home every weekend But all of a sudden it seemed a lot more stark, you know, he'd only been in the US for a few years He had some friends but not, you know, didn't have a well-established social network and he was scared And we were all scared but I think for him it just felt a little more acute because All the things he used to do he couldn't do anymore And he had no like no safety net around him And so basically the last few months of our mentorship cycle was Me being sort of a therapist for him and I'm not a licensed therapist and I wasn't pretending to be But basically he just needed that reassurance that it's going to be okay Um, and I still you know, he I don't think he wrote another word on for the articles We were trying to get done And we were both okay with that because that's what he needed at the time You also need to trust your mentee Um People don't like having somebody hover over them I think it's really important because meant, you know being um Having a mentor is supposed to be a learning experience That you give them some space to go out and learn and you know make the mistakes and figure things out for their own So let them ask for help But also you need to notice when they're struggling and then step in and be like hey, it looks like you need some help um because some people Especially if they're new to a community or they're you know fairly earlier in their careers They just feel really nervous about asking for help Because they feel like that means they don't belong or that they're not good enough Which we all know is completely untrue But it's scary to just be there and publicly saying I don't know what i'm doing. Please help me I had a failure with that with um, it was actually a direct report not a mentee in a company I used to work at he Was good enough at Making me think that he had a handle on things. I just left him alone. We were a very small company We were all overworked. So I was focusing on the stuff I needed to get done and I figured he'd come to me when he needed help And then we go back later. It's like, oh you spent four hours on this It would have taken me 15 because I basically I could had enough experience where I could look at it and say Oh, yes, I know the path to take maybe Give yourself half an hour or an hour on something and if you aren't making actual progress Like if you're not getting a different error message now then come to help and so establishing that sort of you know That trigger mechanism for Hey, this is when you need help and also having me Just sort of checking in on his work. Everyone's well not all the time It's just it's a hard balance that you have to strike Speaking of balances, there is a power imbalance Um, you know an open source projects by and large we're all peers You know, I have a fancy important title And certain responsibilities within the community, but I also can't make anyone do anything Right. We're all equals essentially But just because we're equals on paper that doesn't mean That there aren't relationship dynamics, you know, some people have just a ton of experience in the community and You know, they're well known and people like oh, I know who so and so is and they're really cool And I wish I could be like them that creates a power imbalance And when you have a mentor mentee relationship that also creates a power imbalance You might not perceive it And your mentee might not even be aware of perceiving it, but it's there And it's important to be aware of it You have to create a safe space for your mentee and mike touched on this in his keynote But if you didn't watch that video, I want to repeat some of that here You know, first of all, I I almost hate having to say it But I have to say it like if your project has a code of conduct like fedora does You absolutely need to follow the code of conduct Like that's non-negotiable But it's also important that your mentee can trust you Um, just in the way the same way I was talking about you need to trust your mentee Your mentee has to be able to trust that if they tell you something about A bad experience they're having Um That doesn't rise to a code of conduct issue or whatever, especially You know, if there's a relationship like a formal relationship between your mentee and the person they're talking about like You're not going to go up like so so and so told me that you know, like that's not okay They have to know that the things they tell you unless they are, you know, illegal or You know unethical or you know things like that like They need to be able to confide in you Um You need to offer suggestions and not commands and this one is really hard to because in a global project like fedora there are people from You know all inhabited continents that participate there might be somebody from australia or sorry Antarctica and australia is an inhabited continent. I promise um People from all kinds of different cultures and backgrounds And when you say something that you think is just like I'm from a culture that speaks directly. Okay. Like i'm not Being aggressive or mean about it if the person who hears that is from a culture where things are generally softened They're not going to understand that what you're saying is advice and not a command But I think it's just in general even if you're from the same cultural background and so you don't have that disconnect there You're not there to order your mentee around you're there to offer them suggestions And that goes back to the letting them make mistakes giving them the space to work and learn And of course you need to make sure that they buy into what you're doing Which goes back to the suggestions not commands and leads into the slide. I'll have here in a moment In the meantime, I do want to say that it's okay to stop A mentorship is not a lifetime commitment It could be you could be friends with that person and offer them advice forever That's awesome It does not have to be an informal programs It's generally a very defined period and if you want to continue beyond that you're welcome to but there's no obligation But also there's no obligation to go through the entirety of the defined period And most of the time stopping is not a reflection on you If your mentee says, you know, I'm just not getting the things I wanted out of this, um, you know, maybe I actually am way more interested in this other thing and it happens to be something that you don't have any expertise in That's okay If it's just that you two just don't quite know how to to talk to each other, you know, there's no ill will But you just don't communicate. Well, that happens and it's okay Um The mentorship experience is supposed to be valuable And if it's not then it should end like there's no point in Continuing on another three months when nobody's getting what they're supposed to out of it And again, like it's not that you're a bad person It's just recognizing that hey, this isn't working the way we thought and it's okay to stop Okay, so we talked about some of the principles and stuff Um, the title is best practices. So we should probably cover practices at some point If you take nothing else away from this talk, um This is the slide That I want you to remember And partly I'm so just enthusiastic about it because I was recently introduced to the concept and I was like, oh, wow That makes a ton of sense The most important practice that sort of underlies everything else is to have clear agreements And the word agreement there is intentional because it's about agreeing and not expecting So an agreement is a mutually acceptable the outcome of a mutually accessible acceptable negotiation Um, it's where you say, hey, I think we should do this the other person says Well, what if we did this slightly differently and you go back and forth and you come up with something And like in all negotiations it may not be exactly what you want, but it's something that you both bought into There's an expectation is an imposed demand. It's oh, I expected you to do this Uh, I expected you to do that. Well, I never agreed to that and it's a funny thing about people is that People will be really Self-motivated to keep their agreements. Most people really want to feel like they're trustworthy Like they um, like the word means something like they're not letting you down if they agreed to something They'll do it people will often Reflexively recoil against expect expectations like oh, we expected me to do this. Well, I'm gonna go do the opposite instead um It's just a way that our brains at work apparently um And so when you're starting that relationship with your mentee Having those clear agreements Really helps make sure that it's not. Oh, well, I expected you would do this. Why didn't you and they're like Oh, well, I must be terrible because I didn't do this thing The expectations sometimes aren't even spoken right Um to participate in most mentorship programs. You have to you know, there's some some terms you go through and you click I agree There's not really a lot of negotiation there although. I don't know that most people have tried but Just entering the program you have to agree to these things So you've created that agreement even if the negotiations a little one-sided So what are some things that you might want to agree about? Well goals What does the mentee want out of the relationship? What can you provide to meet those goals? I found that it really helps having specific projects to work on Even if the the outcome isn't that important just having something to sort of focus around Um has been really beneficial in my experience um For example, I had uh mentee most recently Who was wanting to learn a little bit more about project management and also trying to develop her professional skills. She was very early in her career and So we're like, okay. Well, let's set up a project plan to get this certification that you're looking at So we started working through that and like all right, you know, some of it's Sort of a silly exercise because like it's a basically a one-person project and you don't really need some of this formal documentation, but for practice, let's do it And as we work through it see there were some organizational changes and she's thought about her career a little more She's like, I actually don't know. This is the direction. I want to go and I said, that's fine We'll switch to other directions, but we still had that that project to sort of keep the conversation focused and directed So like I said, the goals can change Even over the course of a three to six month mentoring relationship People have external events that happen to them or they have self-realizations. They wake up one morning They're like, wow, I actually hate what I'm doing and I want to go be a llama farmer. Cool. Let's do what we can to help You be a llama farmer another really important expectation or agreement to have In my experience is the agreement of how the mentee will show their work Um Using the repo committing frequently using a pull request flow for feedback. Like this is a really Important agreement to to have sort of like hey, I propose we agree to this Now, why do you want to show your work? Well, because this is an open source project, uh, but You know, there's a lot of value to working in the open especially if part of the goal of the Mentee is to learn to have better perspite participate in open source projects Because doing acting like they are in an open source project is a good way to get that experience um It also just really helps because then you can if you're looking at code or you're looking at documentation You can point to the exact line at the exact point in time that you're talking about and so there's very clear Understanding what it is that you're talking about Um, it also gives the opportunity for others to step in and help So let's say you want to take a weeklong vacation over the summer because you're burnt out and you just want to go to Vipples house and hang out on the beach for a week Some, you know, it's not it wouldn't be okay to just sort of leave your mentee To just sit there and do nothing for a week But somebody else could step in and they can see what has happened and what the current state is and they can help Or if you just get busy one day somebody can step in and help Or if you have multiple people mentoring the same project, they can all step in and help You're seeing a theme here And also someone could pick up the work later So, you know, we talked I think marie talked about it yesterday in the panel session Sometimes you just over Schedule what you think can be done in an internship period That happens all the time that is the like number one problem of uh project program management is optimistic schedules And that's okay, or maybe you're intending it to be a multi phase thing Well, how is somebody going to step in and pick up the work later? If it's not in a repository or somewhere where people can access it And I explicitly didn't say like get repository on the last slide because repository could be you know a shared You know cloud file storage for design assets or things like that like it's it is repository in the most general sense But showing your work Allows for better communication and interaction And it allows the community to benefit from that work later on especially when it's if it's unfinished another thing that's important to agree to is How to provide help I really like the idea of answering questions with questions You know, if somebody asks me well, how do I do this? I really don't want to immediately tell them Because You don't really figure things out. You don't retain it when you're just told like if you go through the process and you Figure it out on your own you get that deeper understanding Um, but ask if somebody asks you a question you're like, well, I don't know what would happen Not helpful, right? You know ask directed questions as the mentee or mentor. Hopefully you have the domain experience where you can say Yes, I I have a pretty good idea what's going to happen um And so you kind of direct lead them down the path, but you uh, just like a horse you can't make it drink And of course you can find resources and make introductions to other people. That's a super helpful thing Um, it helps your mentee learn the project better You know the who's involved and it just you know saves them the trouble of having to you dig through stuff when you know Exactly. Oh, this is the link I need like I'm not going to tell you to go search for it And then have you can like well, which are these and I say well, which one do you think no? Uh meetings I think you should have them But again, you should agree to them. I do think that um Having a high bandwidth meeting So ideally video or phone of some kind is good um, obviously if The technology setup doesn't support it or if you're mentee or you are uncomfortable with that That's not a requirement, but I think it really helps because part of what you're looking for in these meetings Is less a status update point by point of what they're working on in more of a sense of How are they doing? Like are they feeling comfortable with the work or do they sound scared? Do they sound uncertain and that's the kind of stuff that you can't really pick out of text Um, so having that in a regular meeting is good I say regular because I uh If you say, oh, we'll meet when we need to you won't meet um in a regular cadence kind of provides a little bit of a forcing function for Hey, let's you know, I think you could have this done by the next meeting. Yeah, sure You get to the next meeting. It's not done. Okay. That's fine But it kind of puts a deadline on the table so that things can get done Um, the cadence is entirely up to you. It doesn't have to be a daily stand-up um in a lot of my um Red hat mentorship relationships. It's been two a two week meeting. It's a six month Uh process every two weeks. We will meet um in Like outreach and gsoc. I think something a little more frequently is good. Maybe once a week again, this shouldn't be your only communication um But just that sort of short 15 minutes just check in and make you see that they're actually Doing well that they're thriving Um, and it's important to take notes as well Um, I know it can be kind of distracting. You know typing and trying to talk But having notes one helps you remember Did something happen last week that you either should not ask them about or you should ask them about? Um, it helps you remember. What did we agree to do with the last you know for this meeting at the previous meeting? Um, don't try and keep all of that state in your head I didn't put it on the slides, but I should add the word confidential take confidential notes Um, you know, don't put all your ment your mentorship notes in a hack md file or on a you know gist on github Put keep them somewhere safe or only you can see them because again, you're creating a safe space for your mentee Some of those meetings should be checkpoints I think at a minimum do it at the halfway point at the end And these are things where you just sort of talk about the meta work of mentoring Are the goals still valid if they are are we on schedule? Did some of the agreements we have need to be modified? Obviously at the end it's too late to make changes, but then you can kind of see You know treat it as a retrospective and you know what worked and what didn't so the next time that you both participate in a mentorship program You can do it a little better And so let's talk about doing it a little better Um, I did want to explicitly call out the word failure here I had what I'm not sure is a hot take or not the other night um I feel like there are only a few ways that your mentee can fail you and I maybe instead of you I should say the mentorship program But there are many ways that you can fail as a mentor in almost every case that I can think of like every scenario If the mentorship relationship was a failure I'm likely to say that it was the mentors fault no pressure but You know unless the mentee just never decides to never show up just disappears off the face of the earth um Not what you can do about that but everything else You know, you're there to guide the mentee and to provide The the structure and the The information they need the guidance Maybe this is obvious. I don't know. It seemed like a hot take when I had the thought But the good news is that even failure can be success because the goal is Learning and development. It's not the end result of whatever the project you're working on um I'm running low on time. So I'll get to this. This is my last slide but um, I had a Google summer of code intern a few years ago who was working on a project That was going to make my life so much easier And it was going to reduce a lot of the copying pasting that goes on into the fedora change process and it was just make things More visible more uniform everything would be great So he's sitting there coding away. We had a really good relationship. He was getting a lot of stuff done I learned some things from him. He learned some things from me We got to the end and we realized that tiger requires you to click the save button on each Of the individual custom fields that you create and we had created like 20 custom fields and Yeah, maybe we could have discovered that sooner. I'll take the blame for that But We kind of got to the end like we had made the presentation. I had talked about here's what's coming And we realized this is not something we could subject the community to And we just discarded that entire summer's worth of work Do I see that as a failure? Absolutely not. I I hope that um, it was a successful project for him I think he learned a lot. I learned a lot We accomplished what we wanted to in terms of mentorship. We did not accomplish the project we meant to But that's okay And I have left myself about two minutes for q&a or commentary or bananas I do see One question How would you address the mentee not following through even if they seem to agree with the expectations you've negotiated? That is a really good question And that's a hard one and that's something that I personally struggle with a lot Because I try to be a really nice guy and I just don't want to confront people um I think the best way to address it is to ask questions like All right, I've noticed that you're not doing xyz that we agreed to Why Do we need to change our agreement? um Generally, it's not the mentee Intentionally being like forget this, you know, the mentee really wants to be successful here Especially in a you know sponsored program where they get paid based on whether or not they're successful in it So usually it's just about sort of doing the like the asking the asking questions until you get sort of the root And then you address it, you know, maybe they thought that they could agree to this thing But it turned out to be way harder to do than they thought cool We can deal with that. I think I've answered the question. I'll stop rambling