Pen Pal Mentoring

#leadership #career #beginners

Introduction

I have been working in Software Development for over fifteen years. Nowadays I'm the Head of Technology for a small startup working on digital agents. Leadership is my passion.

I've discovered that there are three core approaches to Leadership:

Mentorship
Coaching
Sponsorship

Lara Hogan has written very well about it in her Resilient Management book, and succinctly expressed in this tweet:

Mentoring

Mentoring is how a Leader can actively teach skills to less experienced team members. And so, is the most important tool one can get access to earlier on one's career. Great Mentoring earlier on will yield far more capable and skilled team members in the future.

Earlier in my career I had no notion of how important this was, and the impact it could have on my future. Is hard to seek something when we don't know such a thing even exists. We simply don't know what we don't know.

So I would like to give this small insight to all of you who are starting this great and challenging career path.

Pen Pal

In these modern times many won't know what a Pen Pal is. Basically, people used to exchange hand written letters with each other. You could correspond with your Pal for years, or even a lifetime. Even now some people still practice this form of social interaction. And with our modern technology, some have taking it to email form.

The great thing about this practice is the asynchronous nature of it. You write a letter, post it, and wait for a reply. There is no expectation of instant notification or response, like you would have in a chat, or even email, situation.