Throughout her years managing employees at Microsoft, Meta, and now Anthropic, Fiona Fung has learned how to make a mentorship actually work.
Fung, now an engineering lead supporting Anthropic’s Claude Code, said that mentees need to take some ownership of the relationship on an episode of “The Peterman Pod” that aired on Sunday, January 4.
Good mentors should initiate an early conversation about what the mentee is looking for, Fung said. Ultimately, though, she thinks that mentees should take the reins on goal setting.
“For all the folks out there looking for a mentoring relationship, I would say set really explicit goals for what it is that you’re looking to receive out of the mentoring relationship,” she said.
Fung also said that it’s best to save “status reporting” — think project updates — for asynchronous formats, like chat messages or a shared document. That frees up time to use one-on-one meetings for more substantive conversations, whether that’s about a new opportunity or ways to dig deeper into existing work.
Whenever she’s hosting a one-on-one meeting with a new employee, Fung said she asks what they’re looking for in a manager and what motivates them.
“There’s no right answers or wrong answers,” she said. “But I use that to learn what is important to someone, because it’s different for everyone.”
Throughout her more than two decades at Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic, Fung said some of the best feedback she has received has been about how to receive feedback. Despite her instincts to debug problems and ask follow-up questions, someone advised Fung to remain in “read-only” mode during the initial conversation and metabolize the information for at least a day.
“You may have questions, but save it for another day, because it’s already uncomfortable enough for that person,” she said. “You don’t want anyone to ever feel like they have to justify the feedback.”
Other tech leaders have previously told Business Insider that setting goals is crucial for the mentee. Finding the right mentor is also key — a partner at Goldman Sachs previously said that merely aiming to work with the most senior person isn’t always wise. Instead, she said it’s better to seek out someone who knows your work well and has the time to be your advocate.
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