[Mentorship Working Group] Proposal & Questions

Reps
#1

Mentorship pathway

When a new applicant ask to be a Rep, a mentor is assigned to his/her, like is working right now.

  • This Mentor helps the mentee understand Reps tasks
  • Builds a mentor/coach relationship that helps mentee finds his/her path inside the program/Mozilla. This period have one year limit. Needs to be explicitly renewed after that time. That renovation includes an anonymous survey.
  • If mentee decides to participate at Leadership track, mentor has to give his/her a specific content too (or the mentee could have a specific second mentor for that porpoise).

How to be a Mentor

Only people on Leadership track could be a Reps Mentor. They need to have a special training, based on current Mentor training.

After one year, mentee could ask to renew his/her mentor relationship with his/her mentor or ask for a specific one (regarding her track selection) or ask for another mentor.

Mentor/mentee needs to have, at least, a monthly call to update on news and projects.

Topics to cover on training (during first year)

Basic content

  • How to listen?
  • Having difficult conversations
  • Empathy
  • Different type of personalities
  • OKRs

Leadership content

  • How to manage groups?
  • Conflict resolution

Every Rep has to pass to this content in his/her first year in the program.

Questions

  • How to become a mentor? Should someone apply to be or we continue with manual selection?
  • After the first year, should we need to continue mentor/mentee relationship? Or should be discuss another peer relationship method?
  • What content/learning/skills needs a mentor?
  • Should we create a space where mentors could share experiences? This idea could be a monthly meeting between 3-5 mentors to discuss what they learn, if they had some troubles, etc.
  • Should we check mentor/mentee relationship during first year?
2 Likes
#2

Hi @deimidis,

Thanks for sharing this draft, I have a concern here, Can we extend the mentorship application to other working group also? I am afraid a majority of Reps would run for leadership track because they will become reps mentor someday .

#3

I find this quite interesting, @faisalaziz
Why do you think somebody would to join the track just for the mentor’s status? Are we considering the mentors as something more recognisable in the program?

#4

Hi @couci,

Basically as per our existing structure, Mentorship comes with administrative responsibilities, and basically its a second leap in leadership after becoming a Mozilla Rep .

Mentors are recruited by council because they have shown significant leadership quality and impact in their regional community,

So, Reps might interested see themselves as leaders in program and accept more responsibilities (administrative )

We can’t deny the fact that mentor’s have more visibility in program than Reps and specially to run for Council position a rep should be a Mozilla Reps mentor,
So now my question is that are we limiting Council position to only Reps belongs to Leadership Track?
What would be growth structure for Reps joining other tracks and specially in terms of opportunities?

1 Like
#5

Interesting question. The idea to limit it to Leadership was because of the knowledge and interest that someone on that track will have (this track is about personal development, but at the same time how you could help other to be better).

So for me, it was «natural» that people with that knowledge will have the skills we need to be mentors.

«Resources» will have their own structure to teach and learn, and functional teams are different. So, my idea is: if you are interested on personal and community development, you will be on Leadership track and that will make you eligible to be a mentor.

Could you tell me if this explanation make it more clear? Did you still think there is a potential problem here?

#6

Great catch, I wasn’t thinking on that at the time of the draft. Still I think that the explanation I gave in the other reply is good on why we need mentors being part of Leadership track. Maybe we should change who could run for Council

#7

well I kind of agree with @deimidis
Resources track will have another structure so the administrative tasks won’t be needed. In this case we want the mentors (as far as I understand) to be responsible for personal and community development.
However, I do agree we need to define the Reps that will be able to join the council since we don’t want this to be limited in the Leadership track.

#8

Hi @deimidis ,

My only concerns is about growth and balance of opportunity as individuals, if other WG have equally exciting growth opportunities like leadership track than we would have a healthy ecosystem around, however, if we miss in between there may be chance that reps would choose a WG that is giving more visibility & opportunities rather then WG that suits their interest.IMHO

#9

Hi @faisalaziz regarding numbers and tracks, I think is a bigger discussion that only Mentorship. Resources define that they will not have mentorship system. Maybe other functional teams will not get mentorship either. And some of the tracks/positions will be number limited (or at least this is being discussed right now -again, resources track discuss that we will not need more than one representative from some regions/countries).

Again, I think that being a mentor to be in the council should be discussed in these changes, and that’s a good flag. Also visibility & opportunities so we don’t have people that chose one track or another because of this.

#10

The Meta WG have the role to define some question about mentorship, recognition and skills so with the Community Leadership we have done the survey: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/help-needed-community-leadership-survey/7797

I invite everyone to participate!

Come back to that discussions I think that some information are in the proposal from the Meta WG https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/meta-working-group-final-proposal-open-for-discussion/7837

My personal thoughts are that a mentor need one or more mentor, one is the mentor for the Reps program and the others for the skills that he need to improve or need help.

For me the principal point (as discussed in Meta) are the Functional Areas managed like the Reps Council (election are an easy way to see from the members what they think each others).
For listen I think that we need to improve the report system on remo ( https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/meta-working-group-improve-the-reps-portal-for-recognition/7188/14 ) and I am working to define a proposal from that discussion ASAP.
This tool can be the observatory of the reps for their activity and maybe with data aggregated from Github, Bugzilla, Pontoon and other resources can help the mentors to follow all the mentored mozillians.

I think that an year is enough for a specific skills to evaluate if the mozillian needs to continue the relationship.

Is one of the reason of the survey but I think that is important the knowledge of English to study the wiki and other resources for their job.
Next how to be a non-technical guy because sometimes this is the problem and dedicate some hours a week for that.

This is not bad but I think that this need an agenda to be simple because it easy for that argument talk very much to produce nothing.
An idea can be that the Mentorship WG exist also after the RepsNext launch.

I think that every 2 months is enough to get a recap about that.

#11

Well, this is probably a discussion for the meta WG, but if you want to serve in the leadership body of the Reps program, I think you should need at least run through the leadership track of this program :wink:

#12

There you go, please elaborate there :wink: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/meta-wg-who-can-join-council/8012?u=mkohler