This month Deborah Melkin takes a turn as the host of TSQL Tuesday and asks some interesting questions about Mentorship and Sponsorship. When I started this blog it was mostly as a place to drop bits of code and technical how-to’s and largely has stayed away from personal development, leadership and career planning, largely because I’ve never considered myself any good at any of that stuff. And yet when I look back at my career and life(something I am doing far too much lately due to a big scary birthday looming in November…) it’s very obvious that certain relationships I have formed have been very influential on the way my career path has developed and where I am now.

For me, these relationships have been fairly organic, and I’ve largely never thought of them as Mentoring – rather an open exchange of challenges and solutions. While there are definitely people who have been in a more traditional mentor\mentoree relationship with me, I’d like to talk today about some friends in a less traditional ‘mentoring’ relationship. Actually – I want to talk about having lunch with your mates.

For over a decade, I have two friends who I will grab lunch every fortnight or so and the conversation flips fairly naturally between general friend chat, personal development and specific work issues we are facing. We are all far enough removed in the tech world not to directly influence each others careers, but close enough that the problems we encounter tend to be the same type of thing.

What’s interesting is that there’s no Mentor and Mentoree in these scenarios, just a group of guys who are hitting the same problems at different times and exchanging ideas on how to resolve them. Quite honestly I think any of us would be horrified to have the label ‘mentor’ slapped on us for these lunches, but they provide so many of the benefits.

I’ve heard mentorship described in a number of different ways, but one thing that has stuck with me is a discussion I had some years ago where I suggested someone had acted as a mentor in suggesting a course of action to resolve a problem. I was corrected, and told they had tutored me(given me a solution) rather than mentored me(empowered me to find the solution myself). This distinction is what I get from my regular lunch catchups. Sure – we give advice, but there’s never an expectation that the advice is any more than a suggested approach. As I say we are far enough apart in our job roles that our solutions are usually not specific implementations, but general approaches. The final step of taking the advice on board and acting on it always sits on the person with the problem, loosely ‘the mentoree’.

Furthermore, there is some accountability built in. My friends have a shared mindset when it comes to how much control we have in our lives. Specifically – we all are of the belief that we have the ability to make decisions and take actions and that the consequences are on us. None of us accept that we are stuck where we are, we all know that if we want to be doing something else we have the skills and experience to do it. As such if the same problem comes up two lunches in a row the answer is not usually a suggestion it’s a challenge – “What did you do to solve this since we last spoke about it?”

There is a developer technique known as ‘Rubber Duck Debugging’ where a problem should not be escalated to a senior resource before it has been explained to an inanimate object such as a rubber duck, or rock. The idea is that verbalizing the problem forces them to slow down and think through the steps and logic, which can often lead to discovering the solution. It’s a form of self-explanation that helps clarify complex ideas.

Lunch with trusted friends who are ready and willing to hear you explain your work problems is another form of Rubberducking. Often it’s just a case of taking the time to talk through something, and the solution presents itself. Other times the solution is already there, but you are just seeking the validation that you have reached the right conclusion.

I think there’s a key point in there somewhere about the role a mentor should play. They should be someone that you trust, someone that you respect, someone that has your best interests at heart and someone who will call you out if you are going off track. These are all attributes I look for in friends too.

I fully support the more traditional approach to Mentoring, and applaud the efforts that people like Deborah are making in helping people find these relationships through tools such as WITspiration, but I also encourage people to not get too hung up on the label of ‘Mentor’ and realize that mentoring doesn’t need to be a big formal arrangements, and that if you are prepared to open yourself up a little you can gain many of the benefits from a group of like minded friends.