Simplifying Project Management - The Mentoring Gap

This is the third article in our series on solving common PMO issues.

My experiences with mentoring are like a lot of the PMs I know, inconsistent. In our survey on PMO experiences, and in our experience, less than half of our PMO leaders were active mentors.

It makes sense; as leaders, real, consistent mentoring is hard, and there is likely no drive from upper leadership to actively mentor your team members. Mentoring is often relegated to unstructured 1:1s, or it does not happen at all.

My goal is not to teach you how to mentor - there are too many unique situations and experiences to do much more than regurgitate high-level guidance better offered by others. My goal is to encourage you to look at how you work with your teams and promote the benefits of taking the time to learn how to execute this properly. We believe that mentoring is one of the pillars of consistent delivery.

Why do I need to do this at all?

If you are running a small PMO chances are that your project managers come from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and education levels. Left to their own devices there is no reason that these team members cannot perform well on their own; they will just perform differently. Mentoring allows you the opportunity to continually educate and guide your team members towards consistent delivery and your overall delivery vision.

Lack of organic knowledge growth in PMOs is another reason to actively mentor. Project Management by nature is a solo profession. Even in a PMO team, we all handle our projects on our own. It is rare in a small PMO to have multiple project managers working together closely, it simply does not scale. Lacking the ability to see how their peers operate, the average project manager learns on their own as well. Mentoring allows you to directly teach your teams and guide their development with an eye towards team consistency.

1:1s do not equal Mentoring - I am emphasizing this because it is a common misconception. Unstructured 1:1s (How are you doing, what are you working on, how can I help?) are great for ensuring you know what is going on in your teams, it does not create the same benefit structured mentoring does.

What benefits am I going to get for my time investment?

The first benefit of mentoring is that you will gain insight into how far away each team member is from being able to execute your vision. With a focus on educating your team you open the door to having a productive conversation about their knowledge and skill gaps compared to where you want your team to be.

You build greater trust with your team. Proper mentoring fosters open lines of communication, making team members comfortable asking for help when they lack expertise. In turn this allows you to guide them while maintaining the overall PMO vision.

You understand your team's motivations. I recently had a conversation with a friend that was concerned about an employee’s lack of engagement, despite being one of the highest paid members of their team. My first question was “Do you know what motivates them?” When you have consistent mentoring conversations and identify areas the employee wants to improve you will get a clear picture of their why. Maybe it’s a promotion, maybe it’s greater compensation, maybe they just want to do their job well enough so you leave them alone. It’s all good information and only comes if you have trust and a forum to discuss it in.

Finally, you build a team that is actively working towards consistent operation. One of our key simplicity tenants is to focus on the most valuable two to three processes/deliverables and to execute them consistently before considering adding additional process in to the mix. Mentoring is the carrot, the positive feedback and work we do to get there. We will cover the stick, oversight, in a future article.

How it can go wrong

Mentoring is not micromanagement; be a guide, not a jailer. Don’t take mentoring sessions as the time to point out your employees strengths and faults, save that for your performance 1:1s or reviews.

Let your team self-identify what they want to work on at first. As trust builds over time you will be able to recommend improvements that will be received in good faith. If your team thinks every mentoring session is going to be a critique of their mistakes and failures, they will do more harm than good.

Closing thoughts

Mentoring is not a revolutionary concept, we all know we should be doing it more, or doing it better. We would like to challenge you to look at your leadership style and how it lends itself to mentoring. What works really well for you? Are there areas to improve your teams success through consistent mentoring? We would love to hear your thoughts!