Mentoring A Junior Designer

Key Takeaways

[Music] having mentors is one of I think the key factors to help you kind of grow professionally but I think that a lot of people read about mentors and stuff like that and they think they have to go and look out for mentors but for at least for me professionally when I think back at my career the people who were actually turned out to be my mentors were usually just my bosses and I don't think they signed up to be my mentors they were just working with me and helping me and trying to improve me so and they turned out to be kind of mentors and today for the first time I'm actually going to be managing another designer I've shared with you previously here that um I was looking to hire a designer for the startup that uh I'm working with because I want them to do all the design I kind of want to move into a more management and strategic position over there so I was interviewing a lot of designers we decided on uh kind of a young designer um that's just now finishing kind of a pretty short course on on graphic design and and user interface and uh and today is her first day so I'm like super excited about this and I have like so many things that I want to tell her and I want to teach her and I want to tell her what's important and you know just I want to throw at her all kind of my my knowledge I don't even know if she's is like prepared for it but I kind of want to sit down and tell her look I want to work with you and kind of help you to become one of the top designers in Israel within one year but for that you really have to kind of work your ass off and H but I don't know I I don't know if I just want to throw all my my desires and wishes for her on her and maybe she's not even into that so before we go into the office and I start have to start teaching her about the company and everything that we do uh I think I'll go grab coffee with her just to kind of discuss my expectations from her and and hear from her what's her expectation where do she want to go and for that reason I kind of went back into this book that I've already talked about here in this uh Vlog because in this book there is kind of a small uh segment about it's called win-win agreements and kind of like performance agreements which means that usually when you kind of have when you go to work for an employee you kind of have this basic contract you come to work uh you know 9 to to 5 or whatever and it doesn't and and they're kind of actually telling you what to do so you feel limited you don't have really Freedom you don't really know what's expected to you and when you try to build kind of a win-win agreement like the one discussed in this book what you have to list is you you kind of they break it down wait a second they break it down into five sectors let me read because I wrote it down here desired result guidelines resources accountability and consequences and what that actually means is that we have to talk together about what we're trying to achieve and what I will think is kind of a good work and accountability resources means what I'm going to do to help her achieve that spend time with her meetings you know softw computer whatever she needs and accountability is how we're going to measure that I mean what what consists of a good work and not such a good work and for example for me I'm super for for me one of the most important thing is to be on Deadline and it doesn't even matter if the quality of your work is not 100% it's 80% or even 70% I would rather you bring 70% uh work done on Deadline rather than you know be late few hours or few days to bring 100% so that's something that I think is key to Define in this kind of start of a relationship and so we can Define this and then the consequences like what's going to happen if you do a good job what's in it for you what happens if you don't do a good job and I think setting up these agreements is a key to kind of creating a successful relationship it's actually when I just started to work with with kind of the CEO of this company that we're hiring for right now I I actually created this kind of agreement with him and the the point is that once you kind of Define the desired result for example what type of good work you want then the how you create it for example doesn't matter if I do it from home or from the office doesn't matter if I do it in one day or two hours all these kind of like for me they're stupid things of like principles of how you should work turn to be irrelevant and the only thing that's relevant is the desire ired result so when you focus on that it gives you a lot of freedom in how to achieve that desired result so I really want to set up this correctly with her to kind of tell her what I want so she will have the freedom to go out and Achieve that also I'm not going to be sitting with her every day you know just like a boss in an office I'm going to be meeting her like three times a week for meetings so she will have a lot of freedom and in those three meetings I will try to help her and provide her as much value as I can so she could grow and hopefully really become I hope one of the best designers in Israel hopefully so I'm going to go out and meet her right now I'm pretty excited all right so the day is over I'm actually super super smashed and tired I'm still wasted from yesterday's lunch but overall I think it was a really good day and successful day um kind of started the day discussing with Alex Alex is the name of the new designer um the agreement that I mentioned before and she was kind of worried about the fact that she said that she's kind of perfectionist and she likes to feel good with what she's doing and I kind of explained that to me it's more important to deliver on time rather than doing a perfect job so and she said that what's important for her is to get honest feedback from me and if something is crap that I'll be honest and tell her that it's crap she did say that she's motivated to become a best designer and I'm super happy about that I'm excited to try and help her get to that as soon as possible ible we kind of spend the rest of the day kind of going over all the projects and product that we're working on tomorrow we're actually going to start our first project together and that'll be working on web flow so I'm I'm pretty excited can't wait to get home and and get some sleep hope you guys have a great day I'll catch tomorrow [Music]