1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.
1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.