Steve Trautman, who honed his teaching skills internally at Microsoft Corporation before becoming a consultant with widespread clients across the globe, wants to fix this problem with a simple methodology and an extensive set of teaching tools. In his book, Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring
, the first step, he says, is for managers to clearly identify who is going to teach what to whom, and make sure each party understands and accepts his or her role as mentor or apprentice. Once the roles are clear, the basic process for the mentor to follow is as follows:◦Quickly assess what the apprentice already knows and wants or needs to know and define a measurable learning goal.
◦Ensure that the apprentice has the minimum required setup to be successful (suitable workstation, documentation, vocabulary).
◦Break down the needed information into manageable chunks, creating a brief lesson plan before each meeting.
◦Teach from the lesson plan in a manner that matches the apprentice' learning style.
◦Assess his or her progress along the way using quizzes, paraphrasing and demonstration of new skills.
◦Send the apprentice off with specific instructions on what to do next, then follow up with peer-appropriate feedback.
Mentors are often afraid all this will take too long-after all, they barely have enough time to do their own jobs. To answer that need and the general lack of knowledge on how to teach, Trautman has designed a series of planning and teaching tools that should not take more than 5-10 minutes each.
The first step for planning is for the mentor to determine, with his or her manager, whether he is to be the primary mentor or a "silo" mentor-someone who has deep subject matter expertise and will focus on teaching others only that subject. A manager may want to set up teams of consisting of a primary mentor and several silo mentors; this team can share the load of teaching a new hire or, in the case of a reorganization or a need for better consistency across a department, switch roles for cross-training an entire department.
As part of preparation for teaching, Trautman asks the mentor to plan for managing his or her time with the apprentice and communication. He suggests taking a close look at you like to communicate versus what is an unwelcome interruption. The tools he provides for this purpose include worksheets that will help you determine how you want your apprentice to interact with you, how he or she should structure emails and write status reports, how often you should meet, how to pre-plan meetings, what makes a good question, and what problem-solving protocols to use-including steps the apprentice should take before turning to you. These worksheets take time to work through, but they should save a lot of time over the long run.
Before the first meeting the primary mentor should also take 20 minutes to develop a customized training plan. For this, Trautman offers a "Training Plan Template," which is a five-column chart breaking down the skills or tasks your apprentice needs to know how to do, the sequence or order in which you think the apprentice should learn them, the success metric or test questions that must be answered to prove he or she has learned the skill, the date by which he should be able to pass the "test," and the list of resources that are available.
For individual teaching sessions, Trautman stresses taking five minutes beforehand to create a quick outline of the meeting to provide structure and avoid overload. He also provides a Demonstration Technique Worksheet to use every time you need to demonstrate a specific task. Other tools and worksheets in the book involve individual learning styles, asking assessment questions, requesting and providing feedback, and more. You can read the book all the way through or pick and choose the chapters and tools that are pertinent to where you are in the teaching cycle.
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