Mentorship at the workplace is under-rated. The right mentor can accelerate your personal growth by years. I personally know of folks who have chosen the lower of 2 offers just because of a stellar mentor. I’ve been blessed by several such mentors throughout my career.
Usually in a company, your reporting manager would be a few years senior to you. But every now and then, you might find yourself in a position where there is a big gap between your immediate manager and you. It could simply be the diversity of experience, the overall domain expertise or competence for executive management. When life gives you that opportunity, stick around, observe and learn.
One such mentor that I had was Nik Stroke when I was working from the Bay area for a bank. Every now and then, Nik would effortlessly utter something worth noting. And thankfully, I did. Few of his aphorisms made their way into my book – Excellence (a practitioner’s handbook for Software Engineers).
Here’s a snippet from my chapter on Emails. Nik is the real Jim mentioned below (revealed now here with his permission).
Warm Handover
I got an email at 9 pm in the night which reminded me of an enlightening conversation that I had in the past with a manager about “Warm Handovers”. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Mr. X came to me with this problem, so I asked him to go talk to Mr. Y, because that’s not my area.
Jim: (Very calmly) Cladius, do you know the difference between a cold handover and a warm handover?
Me: Is this a financial services specific term? (The customer that I was working for at that time was a large bank.)
Jim: No, these are generic terms.
Me: I’ve never heard of them before. What’s the difference?
Jim: (Started with his usual Zen hand gestures) When someone comes to you with their problem, and you redirect that person to someone else that is a handover. Now, there are 2 ways in which you can do this. Either you can simply point the person in the direction where he needs to go to find the other person or team. Or you could arrange the transition between the two. And make sure that you move out of the scene only after they both make contact. The latter is a warm handover. Always, prefer to do a warm handover.
Now, circling back to that email and what it had to do with this conversation. Let me set the context over here. One of my reportees Nikhil, had sent an email to Kiran with a specific yes or no query. Kiran’s response to the query was exactly this – “Could you please reach out to my manager Kamesh? He would be the right person to confirm this.” Did you notice the problem here? Kiran and her manager were working out of the USA. While Nikhil and I were working from India. Kiran had just done a “cold handover” (like at liquid Nitrogen level). She had pointed Nikhil to her own manager but not bothered to CC him on that email. Ideally speaking, Nikhil would have replied to that email after coming in to work the next day. Then he would have to wait yet another day to just get a 1-word answer from Kiran’s manager. It would have been so much better for Kiran to check with her manager and reply back to the email. Or at least she could have spent 10 more seconds and CC’ed her manager on that email. Either of these two low-cost options would have avoided cross time zone delays. But Kiran apparently didn’t concern herself with the solution to the problem and focused only on moving the email to her done list. And sadly, I see this kind of behavior manifesting quite frequently.
Not all problems that knock at your door can be solved by you. That’s fine. But when that happens, please put yourself in the shoes of the one who has sought your assistance. Don’t be hasty in simply shooing them away like an unwanted telemarketer. Be gracious and do a warm handover. Warm handovers are nice. Try them! By the way, we didn’t need to wait for another 24 hours in the above instance. Thankfully, I noticed the blunder and looped in Kamesh as soon as I got that email during my evening. Kamesh’s response was waiting in our inbox when we started work the next day.
