Context
TCWGlobal never formally assigned onboarding or mentoring to me — but over roughly four years and three roles, about 15 teammates joined the team I was on, working with legacy PHP systems and permissions structures that had no real documentation, just tribal knowledge and outdated Confluence pages.
Problem
New teammates, including directors and DBAs, were being onboarded through standard corporate/HR training that didn't cover any of the actual product or database knowledge they needed to be effective — the same gap I remembered hitting myself when I joined.
My Role
Across two different managers, I was the person each new support specialist got informally handed to for training and mentoring — not a title, just a pattern that kept repeating. I introduced myself to every new hire and offered a walkthrough beyond the standard onboarding: admin-side guidance, roles and permissions, the specific quirks of the legacy PHP codebase, and why backend database edits were sometimes necessary since the front end didn't support certain data edits.
Team & Stakeholder Dynamics
I built out Miro workflows and reviewed ERD diagrams with new hires, running end-to-end walkthroughs of the software as different user roles would experience it. For the specialists I mentored directly, I scheduled regular 1:1s, tracked their work, and kept them accountable — teaching them how to build relationships, use QA environments, and communicate with business stakeholders and engineers, not just how to use the software.
Process & Decisions
Doing this consistently, unasked, eventually made me the team's go-to person — teammates came to me to work through problems, questions, or ticket confusion, not just new hires. That had a real cost: my manager and a friend in HR both separately gave me the same feedback, that I struggled to say no and was overextending myself trying to handle everything personally whenever someone messaged directly. Once I actually had mentees, I realized not delegating wasn't just costing me time — it was doing them a disservice, since I was the one building all the relationships and expertise instead of letting them build their own.
Outcome
I started delegating more deliberately, which freed up time to actually teach the underlying skills instead of just being the answer. Onboarding and mentoring were never on my job description at any of my three roles there, but I was trusted with the real substance of people management repeatedly — 1:1s, accountability, skill-building — not just a one-time walkthrough.
Reflection
What I haven't had to own yet is the harder part of formal people management: performance reviews, compensation conversations, being the final decision-maker on someone's role. I'd rather be honest about that than overclaim it. What I do know, from being trusted with the substance of it repeatedly without the title, is that I default to over-involvement until someone tells me otherwise — and that delegating earlier, not later, is usually the right call for both people involved.