Sunday, October 7, 2018

How did you more senior leaders make the mental transition from a junior to a mentor?

I've been struggling with this a lot lately. Although I don't have the title of a manager or team lead (which I don't really want anyway), I've become a person people come to bounce ideas off of for systems their responsible for and am the last point of escalation for the switching/routing/firewalling of two data centers and around forty schools ranging from a couple hundred users to a couple thousand. I've come to this point very early in my career, and it frankly feels overwhelming. Even when I'm able to delegate work to less skilled co-workers, I still feel the sting of responsibility for their work. Their questions imply they know about half of what they need to fulfill that task.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's experienced this. I feel I just lack a certain mindset to stay sane through these responsibilities. My ultimate question is, how have you great IT leaders, the ones we all look up to, developed this mentor/educational first mindset instead of divulging into anger over your co-worker's incompetency? How do you maintain your sanity by letting others fail on tasks you know you could complete yourself, but still expect them to take responsibility of that task so you can focus on other problems that need solved? How do you develop and maintain mental strength even when you're not sure of all the answers yourself? It's frustrating enough when vendors come in and put a camera or phone system in on a school data VLAN without calling us first, but even more frustrating when a co-worker puts in an aggregation switch without even enabling spanning tree...

Anyways, this might be the incorrect subreddit for this, but I've always gotten good feedback from this community and respect the people here who frequent it.



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