 I have given a decent number of conference talks now over the years, and right now I'm going through the moment before every single one of them where I'm like, this was a terrible idea. Why did I sign up for this? And also a reminder, like, it feels like it, but I'm not, like, literally going to die. Like, I'm going to survive the next 30 minutes, probably. It's happened in the past. So, hello. I'm Kay Woo. It's short for Catherine Woo, but everyone calls me Kay Woo. I am a senior software engineer at Heroku currently, and I'm here today to share some things I've learned over the years about receiving good mentorship. The slides should be shared off of my Twitter account. The handle should be on most of the slides in here. And as a quick run-through of the structure of the talk overall, I'm going to, you know, dive quickly into what I think the issue is, or how I've experienced it at least, you know, the usual, why do we care about this problem? And then the meat of the talk is, of course, in the solutions of tactics that I've had figured out up until now. And then there's a fairly extensive list of additional recommended references and resources. So, in terms of the problem, first problem was my clicker stopped working for a little bit. So, let's talk a little bit about a typical mentoring interaction that I at least often experienced. Oftentimes, there is maybe some sort of program that where I got matched up to someone, maybe a little randomly, and there were definitely good intentions on both sides, but we're still not quite sure what to talk about. Maybe we go out for lunch a few times. In one case, in college, I'd had a mentor assigned for all four years. However, at the end, I ended up often feeling like nothing was really different. Nothing really changed as a result of that relationship, necessarily. And that's kind of weird, right, for something that's supposed to be quite important for one's career development overall. I have a theory that, especially in the tech world, I feel like there aren't that many of us, necessarily, that have both the experience and the aptitude for becoming really good mentors. I mean, the field overall is really quite young, but the potential is definitely there. So, what might this look like instead? Once I felt like I got better at figuring this out overall, all sorts of things opened up for me. A really big deal would be situations where I got encouragement from my mentors to even consider applying for it and ended up receiving job opportunities that I, on my own, didn't think I was even qualified for. I changed careers into software engineering. I got into giving conference talks, and in the most recent example, when I joined Heroku, I called up my friend, Jonan, who gave a talk about his waffle-making machine just earlier. I just called him to let him know that, oh, I'm really excited about this offer, and here are some of the details. And just on the phone, unprompted, he forced me into practicing salary negotiation with him for 30 minutes and made me promise to him that I was going to give it a shot. And so I would like to say to Jonan that our nanny's bank account really thanks you. That was really helpful right there. So I feel like overall, my strategies are not necessarily groundbreaking, but they weren't obvious to me at first anyway, and so maybe there might be some ideas that'll be new for you as well. Overall, what I really want to do is level the playing field a little bit and have everyone walk away empowered to get better mentoring for themselves and those that they work with. I do want to clarify a distinction between mentors and sponsors. Both are very important, and in this talk, I will be mostly focusing on mentors. The distinction between these, if you haven't come across this before, is something that my friend Kate introduced me to. She had a blog post where she wrote about how mentors give her perspective, but sponsors give her opportunity. And you definitely need both at various points throughout. Sometimes you'll have both roles in the same person. Sometimes they will be different. And I would say you could think of the difference of something like the difference between a sponsor who might think of you when there's a really cool job or project opportunity that comes up and says, oh, this person would be really great at that. Let me put forth their name and nominate them for this. Versus a mentor who instead might be someone that you would go to to get feedback on how you can improve your approach to searching for a job overall. I do want to call out those distinctions a little bit because I think they get muddled sometimes and then it gets confusing based on what you're trying to achieve. And then just some broader caveats overall. I am definitely here to share what I think has worked for me, but I very much want to be self aware of the fact that I know that I am in general probably a little bit more comfortable than average just asking for help from other people and making requests generally. If you've ever heard of the ask versus guest culture spectrum, I'm like pretty far on the ask side of things. I am from the east coast, so that probably makes a big difference there. And what that means for me is that in general I end up operating under philosophy where it's almost always okay to ask for something because hopefully people are totally allowed to say no. That said, I definitely recognize that a lot of people grow up in cultures where that is not really what's done and there's a lot of importance placed instead on not imposing on others instead. So in case it causes discomfort of some kind. I do have a separate talk that goes into this idea a lot more in depth, but I do just want to call it out because maybe some of the tactics might be a little bit more forward than you're used to or you're comfortable with. I mean I certainly at least hope that I'm still being polite and respectful, but either way I think you can definitely adapt these different ideas for your own interests and strength, get kind of creative and figure out how it might work for your comfort level. Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end and we can go through that or you can always find me sometime at the rest of this conference and we can chat and brainstorm a little bit too. So hold up a second. We have to go through the obligatory why is this problem even a problem? Why is it that we want to be mentored? Well, if I can be so bold as to disagree with a part of Matt's keynote this morning, I would have to say maybe some of us do want to take over the world someday. You know, like I wouldn't want to rule that out necessarily. So yeah, this is the characters on the left here are from an old cartoon show called Pinky and the Brain. If in general you're everyone familiar with some random picture or pop culture reference that I'm making, I'm like my brain just is making random connections as I'm like frantically trying to pull these slides together. So I do have an appendix at the very end with associated phrases so you can feel free to go look it up more in depth. There might be some fun stuff in there. So yeah, anyway. On the other side of that, though, more seriously, I just, I guess I just generally had this, always had the sense that it's important to have mentors throughout your career. But for me, for a long time it always seemed like something that other people made happen somehow mysteriously instead. For example, one of my college roommates was just always really amazing at applying for grants. She got a full break. She just had really amazing recommendation letters from all of her different professors and some of them in the same classes that I was taking with her as well. And eventually I learned that she would actually regularly go to these professors' office hours, which when I heard about it I was just like, oh, I have the same syllabus, the same schedule, and somehow that just never really occurred to me as a strategy to use to just get to know someone that way and build the relationship there. So I feel like there are all sorts of things that are kind of like that, that once you spend some time reflecting on it and partnering it, I think there might be lots and lots of untapped opportunities in front of you. One thing I think that you can get out of mentoring is to just demystify the world around you a little bit more. If you've ever felt like, wait, did I miss something that somehow everyone else seems to know a lot about, I feel like mentoring can be a really great way to address that. As another example, I was once matched up with a CTO and decided in our first conversation that I was just going to go for it and just ask this pretty important dude or whatever, what even is a CTO? Because that was never covered in a textbook or anything for me. I somehow missed that part just growing up in suburban middle class New Jersey or whatever. It's not like we run into venture capitalists all the time or anything like that. And the more I thought about it, it's like, hey, no one is born knowing this stuff and the people that do know it don't have an ownership claim on any of it. So I can go ahead and ask and then I will know more than I did the day before. Another follow-on to that I think that mentoring is really helpful at is just seeing what your options might be. For example, if I know what the options are, then I can figure out what experiments I might run to runs, what plans I might want to make to steer towards something or even not away from something instead as well. This could be very concrete things like the next project you might work on, but it can also be for longer term things too, like what various different lifestyles and work setups might be like and whether I would be well suited to them or not. And finally, please don't tell my kid this, but doing things the easy way is awesome, right? If you can learn something the easy way rather than the hard way, you should totally go for that. Also, the reason there's a picture of Ally Wong's baby cobra comedy special from Netflix here is that she has a bit in the special where she's like, I don't want to lean in, I want to lie down instead. So if I could borrow that bit. And honestly, if you take away nothing from this talk whatsoever, totally fine, but if you haven't seen this comedy special, you should totally watch it. It's like really fricking brilliant. I mean, totally not safe for work, so hopefully I haven't violated the code of conduct. But on your own time, you should totally go watch it. It's awesome. She's great. Okay, all right, enough setup overall. Let's get into the meat of the talk. I have bucketed my strategies into three general sections. First, adapting a phrase from the movie Glenn Gary and Glenn Ross. I haven't ever actually watched this movie. I just hear it get referenced in conference talk, so I'm just going to adapt that phrase as well. But the phrase is always be mentee-ing. I'm going to get into a little bit more about what that means in a bit. Second, find your kindred spirits. This here is a reference to Anne of Green Gables, a wonderful, wonderful childhood book, which is the story of an orphan who has lots of misadventures and cares a lot about finding good friends and making connections that way. And third, barring a slogan I saw all the time in the 90s. Keep it easy, breezy, beautiful. It's really hard to say this phrase without tacking along the cover girl at the end. But as I was doing this there, apparently they're not even using this slogan anymore, which really blew my mind. So I guess if they don't want to use it, I can use it here. So we're good. Okay, so this first one, always be mentee-ing. What I mean by this is that all of this process around mentorship, I think it's helpful to really think about it as constantly ongoing, as well as the fact that, well, at least I always built it up in my head as like a, oh, it's super important for your career, you have these really long-term mentorships, and I just really held it up as this giant, big, like, oh, it has to be super meaningful, super deep, et cetera, et cetera. But I actually think that there is a lot of benefits of thinking of it and accepting the fact that you can totally have much more short-term goals and relationships all the way up to, you know, the long-term types of relationships that we often hear more about. So I'm here to say it's totally okay to have some more short-term goals in mind, maybe oriented around a particular or topic or goal, such as giving your first conference talk or something like that. That could totally be a focus of a particular mentorship, and when you achieve that, depending on how things go, that might be just where you wind up, and that's totally fine. Edmund Lau has an article that I've linked in the references where he talks about the idea of designing a relationship. He's mostly talking about running effective one-on-ones between you and your manager, but I think the idea is still really useful in terms of going into something, thinking a little bit more of, kind of, what are we both in this for, what are we going to get out of it at the end? So let's talk a little bit about who you might receive mentoring from. A really common approach I've seen is where there are mentoring programs set up, and then you kind of get assigned to a mentor, and I've definitely had both helpful and maybe less helpful experiences out of this, but it isn't even always up to me necessarily whether there's a program like this around, and so what do you do then? Well, you might be tempted to approach people you admire and ask them, just like, well, will you be my mentor? I'm generally totally all about asking people for help, but the direct approach here, I think generally doesn't necessarily end up being that effective. On the other hand, I feel very strongly that you don't have to just sit around waiting to be noticed either. It just always makes me feel like I'm back at the middle school dance and everyone is just standing by the walls of the gym hoping that someone will ask you to dance or whatever, super awkward and unnecessary. This is one of my personal pet peeves about Cheryl Sandberg's leaning book. The whole book is very much about putting the onus on the individual for progressing their career, and yet I felt like the chapter there on mentoring very much still had an attitude that you shouldn't go seeking mentors, but instead of just do good work and wait for someone to notice. Overall, I don't have as strong negative feelings about that book as I know a lot of other people do, but this one point I definitely disagree with the idea of just keeping your head down until someone picks you to bestow some mentoring on or whatever. Given that, how do you reconcile these two ideas? One way that I would approach it is just skip this part altogether. I really think that people don't have to even formally agree to be your mentor in order to mentor you. They don't actually even have to be aware that it's happening necessarily. One way I would think about mentoring is really just like you're going off and learning something from someone, and obviously we do this all the time from books that people write, articles they publish, videos of talks that you... You could receive so much mentoring from someone, and they're never even really aware of it, and that's super cool. That's totally an option that's already out there. The rest of the talk is going to be more focused on the more one-on-one relationships that you would think about, but just wanted to point out mentoring is learning, and that comes in all forms and ways of doing things. I, for example, have had a bunch of mentors where it just seemed like I would always ask them questions, and then they would just always answer them, so I just kept asking them some more questions, and later I was the one that told them, hey, by the way, I consider you a mentor now, and it's already kind of a done deal, and then they can't say no. Too bad. I trick them into it. So what might a good mentor look like? In general, I feel like I'm looking for someone that I might click with on their values and how they look at the world. I like direct communicators, people who don't beat around the bush, and usually I feel like I can sense that, just like me, they're probably on the inside. We're just really... Oh, I shouldn't put it. On the inside, we're really judgmental people. But we want to be better and nice on the outside, and so I really admire folks that I feel like I've done a really good job of that, and I can really learn a lot from them. But it's not just about having stuff in common, because I think what elevates a friend into a mentor is someone who maybe has had a variety of different life experiences of one kind or another. The best is when it's someone who I'm always curious to hear their take on something, because I'll probably be a little bit surprised, and I feel like when I'm surprised, it probably means that I am about to learn something from here. So, for example, I would consider that I have mentors in a whole bunch of different subject areas, both technical and work-wise, but also I mentioned on public speaking. Before I took the job at Heroku, and through it, I've had various mentors who are more experienced at working remotely, changing careers. I would even have folks I would say I consider my parenting mentors. Folks I turn to, I'm like, oh, they seem like they're doing a really good job, and I would like to do more how they are. Oftentimes, my mentors are people who are doing stuff that I think is really cool, or they've achieved something that I think I might want, and I just really admire them. But there is an important aspect to this, I think, of having it not be someone that I am just elevating onto a pedestal of some kind, because there needs to be the opening to eventually come to really trust this person and be willing to be vulnerable with them. It can be really scary to share that you don't know what you want or what it is that you really dream about, and when, just inherently, I think that there's very naturally a lot of fear and hesitation around that, and it's really wonderful when you can find folks that you trust and feel safe with and be able to bring those things out into the life and into the light and figure out where you're going to go from there. So how do we find folks like this? Let's talk about networking. Networking is definitely one of those other topics that I always felt like I heard people talk about, but I didn't really understand how you were supposed to do it. And the thing that changed for me is when I redefined networking in my head and thought about it instead as just going out and getting to know people and making friends with no expectations necessarily, just getting to know folks out there. I had a baby last year, and so I kind of dropped off the ruby conferences for a couple of years or so. So this is my first one back in a while, and it's been really nice just to walk around and see some familiar faces and catch up with people that I've known for a few years now, which is pretty amazing, I think. So definitely set the groundwork for that. I think that that is really valuable. And so there are lots of specific ways that you might go about this. Of course, we are at a conference right now. There are 800 of us here. Most of them probably you don't know, right? And that's a really great opportunity. Another way, once you go home and we might be a little bit more scattered and dispersed, a strategy that I have found really helpful is when I come across something that I have found really insightful or helpful in some way to make sure that I actually take the time and give positive, thoughtful feedback about that work. Everyone wants to hear more of that, right? They put a time and effort into something. They share it with the world and to hear that someone saw it and took the time with it. I think that builds really good vibes and in general, I think it's really nice to find ways to put more positivity out into the world when I can. I mean, I'm not totally not above leaving a bad Yelp review and stuff. But when there are good things, make sure to stop and notice them and let those folks know. And sometimes even taking it a step further and saying, oh, I really learned a lot from this and going forth and sharing it with others. And there have been times when I feel like I've almost become an unofficial evangelist of some kind for various projects around, like my friend Kate had this, and Chuki, they ran a newsletter on public speaking at tech conferences that I always thought was amazing and I just kind of glommed on and became a real cheerleader for that project. I thought it was awesome. And finally, another point I want to make in this area is to make sure to go ahead and take people up on their offers to help. Like the office hours for the professors, they made that time available and I definitely could have took advantage of that a lot more. There are other folks that I know in the Ruby community, like Opti Grimm, I think every so often, sometimes he'll just sort of be like, great, I'm going to make available pairing sessions for folks or run a discount of some kind and those opportunities are out there and you deserve to make use of them. You do. And then on the social aspect of things here, one thing I wanted to bring up that my friend Amy taught me actually is to just like go ahead and embrace the awkward. I feel like a lot of times we have friends from trying to connect with folks as we just sort of think in our heads. I mean, I definitely have this too of like I am just like kind of an awkward person and like, that's just, oh, I don't know if I want to deal with it necessarily and like what if they don't want to deal with me, blah, blah, blah. But if you think about it, like probably those of us that are kind of awkward, we really outnumber all of the smooth people instead. Just go for it. And if it's really, truly awkward or uncomfortable, just like go forth and apologize. And I'm trying to do that more of trying to put myself out there and then just, you know, it's very also like tied to therefore needing to apologize if I've forgotten someone's name. But usually like I remember the conversation, but I may have like forgotten someone's name. But you know I can ask and then we'll be in good terms again. Okay, so now that you have found and gotten to know some cool potential mentors, what next? So maybe you want to reach out and see if they'll answer a few questions or go grab coffee sometime. And at this stage I think it's all about making it easy for that person to say yes. Schedule with their time in mind, maybe offering up a location that's convenient for them or if you're not co-located pick a commonly used platform, something they can just say yes or no to ideally. In general I do think that having conversations is usually a little easier than having an email chain thread back and forth just because be able to talk out loud is often just a little smoother than having to like figure out the exact right words to write out. But this can vary a little bit. So like while I was on maternity leave I did try to shift the daily schedule was unpredictable enough that I wanted to shift things more into email so that you know I may not be able to make a scheduled meeting depending on like the diaper situation right? But with an email thread like if I wake up at 2 in the morning and can't go back to sleep like I can type something out and try to give a semi-coherent thoughtful response at that point in time. I think ideally it is also helpful to give a general sense of the topics so that the person you're talking to can think about it in the background ahead of time a little bit and not just be completely off the cuff but otherwise try to have it be so that they don't have to prepare very much and can just show up like the more you can set things up and smooth away so that all they have to do is just be present for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever it may be the more likely it is folks will say yes to your request. Keep it breezy by which I mean trying to keep things just like pretty low key and casual. I got this really great tip from my friend Kara who had said she likes to do a thing of trying to lessen the burden or the sense of responsibility someone might feel by asking them and calling it unofficial mentors instead for them to be unofficial mentors to her. In general I think if you can be specific about why you're reaching out to them in particular and keeping this tone of I really respect your work and would love to learn from you it just helps a ton because mentors they're just like us they get imposter syndrome too and they may not necessarily know like why you, why them, why now. The closer the connection in your situations and background I think the better chance you have generally phrases as well like oh I'm really interested in your opinion because dot dot dot fill in the blank there and overall you're trying to demonstrate that you have done your homework and this isn't just a generic request of some kind. And of course beautiful I really just like shoehorned a bunch of things in here to keep it with the slogan but what the section is about is learning relevant things. So first it is okay to not know what to talk about at first but this is totally fine and very common and very normal I think in the next few slides I'm going to try to give you some ideas and strategies but just know that that again is totally normal. One tactic that I really enjoy that this computer science professor Cal Newport writes about is this idea that you can go ahead and ask for experiences rather than asking for advice. The idea is that people don't necessarily have the introspection needed to determine what really helped them most in their own careers. So if you think about it more as interviewing them on your experiences you are trying to gather a bunch of data, you talk to a few different people and then you can analyze for yourself and look for patterns on what the key trigger points might have been along the way. So I think that's a really interesting strategy in general and the nice thing as well is it doesn't require very much prep work on the receiving persons or the mentor side of things. You can just ask them questions about what was happening and leading up to some event that you're interested in learning about for example. So I have a variety of lists of sample topics that you can take for it as well. One is in general things around problem solving like any current dilemmas that you're facing, what options you might have and maybe getting feedback on proposed solutions that you have technical or otherwise. For example, I once was in a situation where I've been working with a mentor really hard towards getting this promotion. It was like a multi-quarter process of some kind and afterwards I was pretty exhausted and I went to her and was just like hey, is it okay if I'm really tired right now and just kind of want to take a little bit of a break? Is that okay? Am I allowed? And she was just like oh yeah, totally. Keiwu, it's fine. I know you. You're like, you totally you're still meeting everything you need to do and by the way you're not the kind of person that's going to accidentally stagnate because you're just going to get bored. I know you get easily bored and sure enough two months later one of these job opportunities popped up and she was like you should apply for this I think you'd be awesome at it and that was kind of the start of my eventual move into software engineering myself so that was pretty cool and it came about because we'd had this relationship and I respected her and trusted her judgment even on something as whether I was what I should be doing next or one area where I really love hearing more about how people think is on decision making because every single time when things come up and people are just like oh this is just like well it's like a case by case basis this drives me nuts because I'm always just like it depends what does it depend on? Can we get specific here? Because things like technical intuition I think it takes a really long time to build that up and it's hard to just, you can't really just take a past situation and try it to apply it to the present because there will be so many details that will be really different in a little bit one way or another, right? So I feel like asking questions along the lines of what made you decide some certain thing, what were the factors that you considered and one question I really like to ask is what would have changed your mind? What are some things that if they were different would have led down a different path in this situation? Because then you can, it takes that past experience and broadens up the potential future situations that you might apply it to and gets that much more out of it I feel. And then another area then is as you're building up this trust there are all sorts of things where you just kind of get the behind the scenes look at what's going on. There's an idea I came across recently that I really like that is called Effort Shock and the idea behind this is we are so used to movies like The Karate Kid or Rocky or whatever else where there's like the training montage and you're like oh there's all these clips and like jaunty music playing and in real life you're like that is where like that takes sweat and tears and what is going on in there. What do I really need in order to do something along those lines? So asking what was your strategy to achieve your goal and how did you work through a mistake? Because I assure you other people have made all sorts of mistakes like it would I mean if someone doesn't have a mistake that they can talk about then they're just lying there is something there and if you have that relationship you could learn more about it and again learning things the easy way maybe avoiding that particular situation yourself in the future. And finally this is where the trust and that vulnerability really come into play of asking for fairly personal feedback at this point. When you get to know someone over a longer period of time sometimes this is even harder in a way because you know I've been working with someone and I really respect their judgment and I'm scared of hearing that I'm not measuring up in some way right but if I can find a way to get past that I think that information there can be so valuable because this person knows me, knows my tendencies, knows what I've done before in the past and knows where I need support perhaps and where I might need to be pushed a little bit but you know they don't want to hurt my feelings either and so if I take the step and go to ask them instead of hey like what do you think I could really like would be really worthwhile for me to focus on learning next or if I have this goal in mind what do you think you know what are some options that I have for trying to improve in this area because you know these folks they're in this to help you as well they want you to do better and if you solicit that for them it just makes it easier for you to get that information that you need overall I do want to take a moment and make the point as well that you don't have to take all the advice that you're given just it's not an all or nothing situation which like I would definitely sometimes have a pretty black and white view of it but all you really need to do is to indicate that you've thought about it I mean if you've if you never follow any of the advice or if you never make any changes like in those before interactions that I talked about then maybe this isn't quite a mentoring relationship but I do want to say like you don't have to take everything that you're given you just think about it and see if it suits you and so overall you can really do a lot to make yourself be a great mentee and stand out as someone that others feel rewarded for helping in some way I don't actually mean literal gifts in this case so a lot of times like if I'm going out for coffee with someone I actually prefer to buy my own drink and I just don't want to impose on someone when like maybe they're looking for a job right now but on the other hand like once I've gotten to know other people more I definitely sometimes have bought them books or I really love buying baby shower gifts for people all of their registries this is like baby stuff it's so small it's so cute but we can go a little more classic and you know write some really good thank you notes where you know specifically reference what you talked about how that had an impact on you and demonstrate that reflection that I've been talking about and so you know like Matt said this morning seriously in our for our Rubik community we're trying to form these positive feedback loops here so finally then like a really key point is to make sure to follow up and stay in touch tell people how you made use of your advice I kind of live and die by my calendar so I literally have a monthly reminder in their recurring event that's just like do a networking thing of some kind and usually what that really means is just firing up and writing a you know shorts and medium length email to maybe a former work colleague of some kind or a friend I haven't talked to in a little while and just like hey like here's what I'm up to wondering how things are on your end hope you're well kind of thing often times like I'll even include like oh yeah I just wanted to let you know that I still think about the story that you told me or like this insight that you shared from years ago and I think that that can be something that's really nice for folks to hear oh yeah I'd like this quote of it's it's remarkable how much people appreciate hearing from you when you don't even want something from them I think it's a good thing to keep in mind really a lot of what I've been talking about is towards this theme again of building relationships with trust so that you get that honest advice that you might not get elsewhere and I think as well like it can actually be really helpful from even just a selfish perspective to consider paying it forward and mentoring others from that idea of you learn better by teaching it because like if you consider it from an instructor's perspective a really good teacher you know they might worry about being pushy or condescending and so even while they take responsibility with those power dynamics to manage the classroom or that relationship you can help them by making eye contact or kind of speaking up and raising your hand when you have questions and so to that end I did find recently this guidebook that Thoughtbot has put in now for mentorships there so that's definitely available as well okay resources as I'm near in the end a whole bunch of articles and references so these will have like sample wording that you can use and go into more depth again about a lot of ideas I mentioned even more articles podcasts and videos I don't listen to a ton of podcasts but these ones were pretty good and the Ask a Manager one has transcripts that get done so I can read that really quickly too blogs in general I like reference these books I think they're amazing they're super smart and thoughtful about these things and then a variety of these books the first one deep work I am super obsessed with it it's all about how to really go deep in your field and do meaningful work the effect of engineer is really good about how do you increase your impact I have some quibbles with the working in a corporate environment and unconscious bias so I can talk about that later and the manager's path I haven't actually read that one but it's by Camille and I've heard that even though it's kind of written for managers it has a lot of good stuff as well about you know from an individual contributor perspective kind of things that you might do to improve that relationship okay thank you