I’m officially a mentee for the first time.

I found out about the mentor everywhere program on the support driven slack (an amazing network/resource for anyone in a customer support/success/service role).

I submitted an application to be in the first cohort and crossed my fingers.  I’m pretty confident in my CS skills (and have support driven for help), but I really didn’t have any resources for helping grow in other areas.

I got an email notification that I was selected to be in the first cohort and was so excited!

I’ve never had a mentor, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew it’d be good stuff.

First, Chris reached out and we did a quick e-meeting/introduction.

I did a bit of poking around and found this on his company’s website:

His previous experience was great, but really the last sentence is what convinced me the automattic team did a great job in matching me with a mentor.

Tacos.  Enough said.

In all seriousness though, support, operations, and leadership are things I want in my career and Chris’ experience falls directly in line with that.

In our intro emails we also set up today to be our first official meeting.

We used zoom and of course my camera decided that it really wanted to be a camera from 2002 and I was super fuzzy during the conversation.  We worked through it though and my tacos conclusion turned out to be true…our conversation flowed pretty easily.

We talked about our history and what we hope will happen during the mentorship.

Here’s a quick summary:

My overall goal for the 6-month program

To be on a path that leads directly to management/leadership.

In order to achieve that goal we’re going to focus on

Learning and nurturing management and leadership skills.

To make sure we stay on track

We’re meeting every other week and I’m blogging about the experience here 🙂

Chris had some great advice on leadership.  My favorite was:

You’re going to make mistakes as a manager, but as long as you learn from them, you’re good.

I’m pretty sure I’m paraphrasing, but that was the sentiment.

Other great tips were:

• When giving feedback, it’s good to remember that you respect your employees.  Part of respecting them means giving honest feedback.
• Make sure you’re serving your team.  As a leader, it’s your job to make sure they feel supported.
• Leadership books are great, but there’s no substitute for life experience.
• Step up and do the things that need to be done – this was an answer about the transition from support to CEO.  Helping out and staying interested, it counts.

 

So, as you can tell, we’ve already got some great plans.  I’m looking forward to developing this relationship as time goes on and seeing the impact it has.

I’ll post more as it happens 🙂