I’ve used a variety of approaches and questions during interviews over the years to identify future leaders. Nothing feels better than watching someone you took a chance on outgrow their role and start sharing their knowledge and developing others on the team. But how do you find these people? How do you know that someone is not only going to deliver, but help mentor less-experienced teammates and raise the level of the whole team and organization? It can be fairly easy to find people who can do the job that you hire them for well, but how do you know if that’s all they’re ever going to contribute or if they’ll develop into a superstar?
In IT there’s a mythos about the superstar individual contributor. The guy (unfortunately, it’s almost always a guy in the world of IT) who can deliver amazing results if you just leave them alone and don’t give them any responsibilities besides producing code. Leaders learn to lean on these people to get the challenging done in timelines that appear impossible. The individual contributor takes little time to manage because they are so excellent at what they do, and can make the leader look really good in the process.
This dependence is understandable and produces stunning results in the short-term, but a strategic leader doesn’t plan in the short-term. They should know that this over-reliance on a superstar is a mistake, and will lead to massive failures of the team in the long-term.
Questions addressed
- What’s wrong with individual contributors?
- If you have an individual contributor, what do you do about it?
- How do you find and develop mentors?
Everyone should be learning
First, everyone in an organization needs to be learning and developing. Do you have a team member who is a fantastic performer, but has poor people skills and/or doesn’t want to be bothered with mentoring? Great! You found their opportunity for improvement. This person has as much potential for learning and growth as a mediocre performer who is still learning their job.
Just like every other skill that is critical to the performance of a team, mentoring should be practiced by every member. Everyone knows something that someone else doesn’t, and a good leader needs to create an environment where sharing that knowledge is an expected practice until it becomes a habit. Someone who doesn’t participate or doesn’t do it well, should be coached just like someone who doesn’t perform any other task well.
Coaching and mentoring need to be expectations for every member of the team, not a specialized skill that only a few perform. Anyone who is unwilling to develop this skillset should be treated like anyone else who is unwilling to learn a critical component of their job. If you won’t mentor, you can’t do this job to our satisfaction and it might be necessary to consider that this isn’t the right fit.
The monopoly of knowledge
Why is it so important that everyone mentor? What does it matter if the superstar is delivering, and the team’s output reflects it?
The problem is that the superstar individual contributor is holding your team hostage with their knowledge. If they get hit by that metaphorical bus and are no longer with your team, is there anyone left who can pick up where they left off? Probably not. Is the documentation that they left good enough for someone to ramp up in their absence? Maybe, but who really knows what the superstar has been up to over there in the corner with their headphones on all day, every day.
Mentoring and collaboration ensures that no one is the sole proprietor of any critical knowledge for your team. Someone who has to repeatedly coach new team members on how something works will be highly motivated to write good documentation, and when, inevitably, the owner of any process or application in your system moves on to other things, the team will be able to continue on with a minimum of disruption.
Finding mentors
How do you make sure that someone you’re interviewing is not only willing to mentor, but is excited about it? After all, in all of my years of interviewing and asking how the candidate how they felt about mentoring, no one has ever been anything but positive about the idea. Who wants to tell a prospective employer that they’re not a team player, and don’t really care to develop team mates? No one, that’s who.
My first test is the candidate’s résumé. Someone with more than five years of experience and exclusively technical accomplishments is a big red flag. I look for mentions of team leading, collaboration, and they get bonus points for informal coaching such as leading lunch n’ learns or being part of a standards group.
The second test is the enthusiasm of their response. If you ask them about how they feel about coaching and have to interrupt them five minutes later because they won’t stop talking about it, that’s a much better sign than a monosyllabic response. Pay attention to the context clues. Do they have experiences and stories they can readily share, and do they convey these stories with excitement? That’s a person who’s going to contribute a culture of mentorship to your organization.
Actively seek out mentors and give them the space and environment to share their knowledge, and your teams productivity will explode. A team of coaches and collaborators will always outproduce a team of gifted individual contributors in the long run, no matter their level of expertise. Like a soccer team of gifted players who never pass, you may get a few moments of brilliance that will win a few games, but over the course of the season teams that work well together are going to win out.
