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Mentoring is something that I fell into. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and I paid my rent and bills through university and sound school teaching music and music technology to kids from five years old through to late teens. Over the past two years, I’ve wondered how I could give back to my community and give young people working in audio the kind of support that I would have appreciated at the start of my career.
I’ve offered advice by email in the past and enjoyed the process, but these interactions usually came to an end after a short exchange, once the person asking for help got the answers they needed.
What I wanted was an opportunity where I could feel my input was valued, and I could see how I was making a difference to someone’s career.
The opportunity arose at the ABTT (Association of British Theatre Technicians) theatre show earlier this year, when I introduced myself to the Head of Stage Management at ALRA (Academy for Live and Recorded Arts) drama school. Based in London, UK, ALRA has an established stage management and technical theatre course with modules covering theatre sound, lighting, stage management and other technical production disciplines. As it happened, they had an opening for a sound design tutor.
This role was exactly the sort of opening I wanted. As a trial, I put together a seminar on an overview of theatre sound design and presented it to the technical theatre students. The seminar was a success, and I was brought on board as the sound design mentor for the school’s largest production to date and first musical in quite a while: The Wizard of Oz.
Here are some of the things I have learned in this process:
To properly guide someone, you have to know as much about them as you can: their skills, level of experience, strengths and weaknesses. As a mentor, you’ll be coming from a position of greater experience and knowledge, but this shouldn’t give you licence to assume you know exactly what your mentee needs.
One of your first actions should be to ask them what they want from you. Listen to what they say to you directly and listen when they engage with colleagues in production meetings and team meetings to identify other areas or topics where they may need support. Sometimes what a mentee needs most is to have their mentor just listen as they talk through a problem or strategy.
Mentoring is a relationship, not just imparting knowledge. The relationship will only be worthwhile for your mentee if you are willing to interact with them. It’s not enough to just hand over information. Challenge them, ask questions as well as answering them, go and find the answers they need, offer support and learn from them as much as they learn from you. Otherwise, you might as well sit them down in front of Google and walk away.
Mentoring comes in a lot of different flavours. You might just be there to offer occasional guidance or support, or you might be mentoring someone for a specific project.
If you’re used to being the lead (sound no. 1, sound designer, sound engineer, sound supervisor) on a project, it can be hard to learn when to sit back and observe.
A few years ago, it would have been very hard for me to sit back in a production meeting and let someone feel their own way, only offering advice when I felt it was totally necessary. I’m a detail-orientated perfectionist, and it’s taken time and effort to learn when to hang back and just observe, and to accept that I am not solely responsible for the sound for this particular project. I’m always aware that my role is to guide and support someone else’s learning process.
Mentoring teaches you about yourself. You might find you have important skills you didn’t realise were there. You might find there are definite areas of your approach to work that you can stand to improve.
It’s also fine to not know all the answers. Unless you work at the cutting edge of sound technology, it’s probably inevitable that your mentee will be an expert on the latest cool virtual synth app that you’ve never heard of, let alone used. Concentrate on what you can teach them – could their grasp of signal flow use a bit of a brush-up or could their compression theory benefit from a practical demonstration? If they introduce you to something you’ve never seen before, great. As long as they’re learning from you, that’s the main thing. If you feel they’re at a level where you can’t teach them anything, then it’s not a good fit.
I believe the most effective mentoring relationships are ones where the mentor and mentee meet regularly. When, how often and for how long you meet may be defined in a formal contract or it may be a more casual agreement. Regular meetings help both of you track progress, and if the mentoring relationship is set to last a defined period, they are an easy way to set deadlines for goals. Be reliable. It’s important your mentee knows how and when they can reach you, so they feel supported.
In part 1 I talked about the importance of establishing what your mentee needs from you. Once you have this, you can look at how your mentee prefers to learn. They might learn best from listening to your explanation or by watching a demonstration. They may prefer to get as hands-on as soon as possible, with you in a supporting role. They may want a formalised structure of topics, or they may be more self-sufficient and prefer to work to their plan.
It can be very tempting when you see someone struggling with an issue, to show them how to fix it by doing it yourself. Equally, when you hear something that might not fit with your personal sound aesthetic, it’s easy to say “this is how I would do it…” and take over. Neither of these is particularly useful if you want your mentee to learn, especially if you’ve already established that they learn best by performing a task themselves. It’s important that you allow them to make mistakes and not just hand them answers on a plate. You don’t have to solve all their problems; you do need to support them as they find their answers.
It’s fine not to be a fit with a potential mentee. We all need different types of support at different times in our career. We’re all people too, with unique personalities and requirements. Although I feel you do need to have a certain number of core skills to be an effective mentor, there can be many reasons why a mentoring relationship just isn’t a good fit for either one of you. If you can, call a halt to a potential mentoring situation early on if you feel neither of you will benefit from it, so your potential mentee can find a better fit as soon as possible.
When your mentoring relationship comes to an end, make time to give and receive constructive feedback. Don’t be afraid to cover the challenging scenarios as well as highlighting areas you thought went well, and encourage your mentee to do the same. Review any goals you’ve set and consider how the overall experience will inform your mentee’s next project – and your future mentoring relationships.
Article by SoundGirl: Kirsty Gillmore
Another great article by SoundGirls: I Have A Work Addiction: Life In Entertainment
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The mission of SoundGirls.org is to inspire and empower the next generation of women in audio. Our mission is to create a supportive community for women in audio and music production, providing the tools, knowledge, and support to further their careers. SoundGirls.Org was formed in 2013 by veteran live sound engineers Karrie Keyes and Michelle Sabolchick Pettinato and operates under the Fiscal Sponsorship of The California Women’s Music Festival, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. In 2012, Karrie and Michelle participated in the “Women of Professional Concert Sound” panel at the AES Conference in San Francisco. The panel was hosted by the Women’s Audio Mission (WAM) and moderated by WAM founder Terri Winston. Terri brought together five women working in live and broadcast audio. The groundbreaking panel (which also included Jeri Palumbo, Claudia Engelhart and Deanne Franklin), provided young women and men a glimpse into life on the road, tips and advice, and a Q & A with the panelists. More importantly though, was how incredibly powerful the experience was for the panelists. We had all been in the business for 20 years or more, yet most of us had never met before that day and within minutes we bonded like long-lost sisters. We were struck by how similar our experiences, work ethics, and passions were and wondered why our paths had never crossed and how our careers would have been different had we been there to support each other through the years. Each of us are strong on our own, but together we were even stronger and a powerful force. We were empowered. Each of us had been asked hundreds of times in our careers: Are there other women doing sound? How did you get into sound? How would a young woman go about getting into sound? Through creating SoundGirls.Org, we hope to establish a place for women working in professional audio to come for support and advice, to share our success and failures, our joys and frustrations, and for empowerment and inspiration.
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