Remote-first coaching and mentoring
Summary
Remote coaching and mentoring can be even more impactful than their in-person alternatives. But they need attention and intention.
Before anything else, we must recognise what each of these are. We can’t use the terms interchangeably.
Coaching benefits from attention to detail. Remote coaches must consciously find opportunities to dive into these details.
Mentoring on the other hand benefits from the right pairing between mentors and mentees. Only then can a mentor be effective with their long-term focus.
Tools and platforms drive effective remote coaching and mentoring. Without them, in-person alternatives will always seem superior.
And last, no coaching and mentoring is possible without personal drive on part of the beneficiary. You must make the expectation about owning one’s learning, explicit.
A common argument against remote work is that coaching and mentoring are harder when you’re all remote. To some extent, this is true. Take the example of people fresh out of college. For most people, college is still an in-person, mostly real-time environment. When these freshers join a remote-first company, they must make a mental switch. From in-person behaviours to remote behaviours. From synchronous, to async-first. This switch takes time and the period of change can be challenging.
So I don’t fault companies who pick up examples such as these as a stick and beat up on remote working. These are usually companies with leaders who haven’t yet invested themselves in the idea of being remote-first. And hey, that’s OK! Leaders in such companies have seen in-person coaching and mentoring work better than when they’ve been remote. The operative word here is “seen”.
The conventional image of coaching and mentoring, is “in-person”
Remote work doesn’t have a seductive visual. It’s mostly people working in their unglamorous homes. Some in attics, some in cellars, and some in spare rooms or storage spaces. It’s just heads looking into screens. Contrast that to images of mentoring and coaching you may have seen on stock image websites. They’re all in person. All in an office setting. It’s evident that these popular images of in-person coaching and mentoring “look better” than what happens remotely.
You probably know where I’m going with this article, though. I don’t think remote coaching or mentoring is in any way inferior to that in-person. In fact, I believe that if companies are intentional about building modern coaching and mentoring skills, they’ll do much better at being remote-first. Allow me to explain.
Coaching and mentoring are not interchangeable words
Before we go any further, let’s address the fundamentals. Too often, I see people use the words “coaching” and “mentoring” interchangeably. Both of these activities refer to two separate things.
| Coaching | Mentoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | About improving a specific skill or achieving a specific goal. | About developing your skills and knowledge more broadly in a particular field. |
| Focus | Short-term | Long-term |
| Involvement | Day-to-day | Periodic |
| Relationship | Structured, usually on the same team. | Informal, often from another part of an organisation or even a different company. |
| Accountability | Hold people accountable for progress while providing task-level feedback. | Offer a sounding board and broad guidance. |
It’s important to realise these differences before you can have an intelligent debate about how to perform these activities in a remote-first environment. Or if in-person, is better than remote 😀. Now that we understand these differences let’s dive deep into remote coaching and remote mentoring.
There’s no coaching without detail
If you’ve been on a sports team, you’ll understand what I’m about to say. Your coach needs to know your game. You can’t advise someone to fix their delivery stride or their bat swing if you don’t see them execute their skills. Day in. Day out. Similarly, on knowledge-working teams, you cannot coach people whose work you can’t see.
In a physical profession like sport, you often need to be in the same physical space as your ward, to offer meaningful, in-context advice. Of course, even modern sports coaching is developing to where a lot of coaching strategies don't need a physical presence. Analytics, match up simulations, video and other such innovations help reduce the need for physical presence, even for sports coaching. But let’s not go too far down that rabbit hole.
Coaching for knowledge work, however, needs intentionality, more than physical presence. To see someone’s work, you must look at a computer screen. More often than not. Be it code, writing, or design - all the work is on a computer. Even for non-technical tasks like facilitation, there are artefacts, like the plan for a workshop, the facilitation frameworks and the eventual synthesis. There’s very little coaching you can do without your head stuck in a computer screen. And so, as a coach, you must be intentional about seeing people’s work and getting into the details.
In my experience as a coach, both in-person and remote, here are some techniques that have worked for me.
Clear relationships. In theory, anyone can coach anyone else, but also some people are more equipped to do so than others. For example, I’d consider it a tech lead’s responsibility to coach their developers. Product managers are in a suitable position to coach business analysts. Senior designers can coach junior designers. Many organisations codify these relationships by building a reporting structure. I consider this to be good practice. Managers are in the best place to coach their people and show radical candour.
Pairing on a task. Pair programming is not just for developers. Everyone can do it. When you work with someone on a task, you get to see their approach to work, first-hand. You can allow them to lead, while gently nudging them to fine-tune their outputs. The greater the variety of tasks you work on with someone, the closer a look you get, at their work style. This is also a great opportunity for people to learn from you if you decide to take the lead.
Get into the details, asynchronously. Just like a modern-day sports coach examines video footage to identify coaching opportunities; as a knowledge-working coach, you must get into the details of your people’s work. Code reviews, design reviews, and other such practices come in handy here. Build these practices into your workflow and make them explicit.
So that’s coaching. The practices I mentioned have no relation to where you work. And frankly, I can’t see how someone can coach anyone else without following these practices. Ok, let’s move on to mentoring.
Mentoring is all about long-term focus
Let me admit the truth. I enjoy mentoring far less than I enjoy coaching. And I think it’s partly because it’s difficult to pair mentors and mentees. I’ve enjoyed pairing when I’ve found my mentee’s career trajectory and work style similar to my own. For example, I believe in the power of reading and writing and quiet reflection. So there’s no point pairing me with a mentee who doesn’t enjoy reading, writing or reflection. I have no tools or advice to offer them!
That said, when the pairing is effective, a mentoring relationship can be fruitful for both parties involved. From my many failures as a mentor, let me tell you what I’ve learned.
Mentoring works when there’s an overlap in identities; i.e. when the mentee aspires to have an identity in the future, similar to what you have in the present. For example, you may be an author and your mentee may aspire to be one in the future.
Cultivating this sense of identity drives a focus on habits and systems. One doesn’t become an author overnight; for example. That identity is a product of certain habits; such as writing at least a paragraph every day; maintaining a backlog of things you wish to write about; or curating a collection of your writing so one idea builds on another.
Being a mentor requires a willingness to explore deeper topics. Such as the notion of one’s purpose. Or being able to help someone identify their values. Purpose helps you identify someone’s long-term intent. Values clarify the choices one makes during that long-term journey.
And last, mentorship is effective when you can help your mentee stay even-keeled through the trials of their careers. So, while you help them learn from their failures, you stop them from getting bogged down. While you celebrate their success, you don’t let them bask in the afterglow for too long. As Kipling famously said, “If you can meet success and failure and treat them both as impostors, then you are a balanced man, my son.”
None of what I said about mentorship has anything to do with being remote or in-person. If anything, being remote takes away location as a limiting factor, when pairing people with the right mentors. And I daresay that many mentoring activities are deep enough that both the mentor and mentee need to spend their own time, asynchronously to make the most of their synchronous interactions.
Effective tools and platforms are key
Speaking of asynchronous and remote work in relation to coaching and mentoring, we must recognise the importance of effective tools. Most leaders who criticise remote work for being bad for such activities haven’t experimented with modern tools.
Modern tools make coaching and mentoring more effective, when remote
Let me give you a few examples of how tools and platforms can make remote coaching and mentoring even more effective than their in-person alternatives.
Pairing tools like Tuple and CoScreen help you pair more effectively than in person. You’ll have all the goodness of pairing without the distractions of a noisy office or annoyances such as body odour and keyboard hogging.
Tools like FocusMate help you be a virtual accountability partner for people you’re coaching or mentoring.
By using Trello or Fellow, you can make your 1:1 meetings effective. These tools help to rise above the here and now, and address transactional topics asynchronously, so meetings can focus on connecting as human beings.
Virtual whiteboards like Mural or Miro don’t just make it easier to have a visual reference to a conversation. You can also persist outputs of such conversations to have a deeper memory of your coaching and mentoring relationship. No mucking around with physical sticky notes, and hard-to-read images of physical whiteboards.
Knowledge and learning platforms like Qatalog, Confluence, Degreed and Docebo help surface information and common practices in your company. That way, coaches can focus more on execution than on knowledge transfer.
Enterprise social networks like Igloo, Workplace or Jive can help people build connections with potential mentors who they’d otherwise have no way to work with.
Platforms like MentorCruise allow you to work with mentors beyond your immediate professional circles. Company no bar. Location no bar.
If you don’t make the right kinds of tools and platforms available to your people, it’s natural that you’ll find in-person coaching and mentoring superior to their remote alternatives. It’s like asking people to dance in an iron cast. That said, if you want to make an honest comparison, you can do so only when you invest in the right tools. If only, as an experiment.
When you do this right, none of your investment in tools will probably be a throwaway. Let’s say you decide that your organisation must have an in-person way of working. Even then, beyond a certain size, your company and many of your teams will be distributed. A remote-first mindset coupled with the right tools will always stand you in good stead.
Never underestimate drive
Many years back, when I was part of a theatre group, I had an acting coach. As a teenager, I still didn’t have a well-developed voice. Even in halls with the best acoustics, I’d struggle to get my voice to the back rows. But I had a deep desire to learn. I kept nagging our coach to help me find ways to project my voice. I’d go back home every day, exhausted after long hours of practice, and still try new ways to train my voice. I wanted to learn how I could sound good, even after a long act, and stay audible in a theatre with no mic. My desire to learn, helped my coach provide little nudges, so I could excel as an amateur actor. Not only did she teach me how to project my voice, I learned how to sound much deeper than I was at the time. My drive fuelled her ability to support me.
And that’s the elephant in the room - personal motivation. You can’t coach or mentor someone until they have a deep desire to grow in a certain direction. Force-feeding doesn’t work for such relationships. In an in-person setting, you may have the illusion of a captive audience when you attempt to work with an unwilling mentee or coachee. That illusion fades away when you’re remote.
A remote-first environment demands that individuals who want coaching or mentorship, are also self-driven. A passive approach doesn’t work. People must be willing to put in the hard yards in their own time - asynchronously.
To get the most out of remote coaching and mentoring, you must set expectations about personal motivation, with your existing workforce. Make it clear that you won’t spoon-feed anyone. It may also mean that you only hire people who demonstrate such drive. In fact, it doesn’t matter whether you’re remote or in person. There’s no coaching or mentoring without personal motivation.
Attention and intention - my friend Amy Luckey talks about this all the time. This two-word mantra applies to everything related to remote work. Effective remote teams and companies don’t rely on happy accidents. They’re intentional about every process and every outcome. Not that they don’t care about serendipity. But preparing for serendipity is also a science.
So I conclude with a question for leaders who are sceptical about remote coaching and mentoring. What are you doing, to show attention and intention?