Somebody asks whether you would mentor them. You say yes, because you remember being them and because no feels like a small cruelty for no reason. Three weeks later you are in a release, one of your team is off sick, and their message has been sitting unanswered for four days.
You meant it when you said yes. The problem is what you actually promised.
An open ended promise has no unit in it. Nothing tells you whether you are meeting it, so it never reaches the top of any list, and it quietly loses to every deadline in your week. Worse, the person on the other end has no way to read the gap. They do not think you are busy. They think they asked too much, or they were not interesting enough, and they will not ask you or anybody else for a long time. Newer people take delays personally, always, and a mentoring silence is the most personal one available.
So make the thing you promise small and shaped. Not I will mentor you. One hour, on a named day, on one subject. An hour on Thursday to look at how you are approaching the migration. That is a promise you can still keep in a bad week, which is the only test that matters.
Then renew rather than extend. At the end of the hour, decide whether to book another, and say plainly that you work this way because you would rather keep a small promise than break a large one. Nobody has ever been offended by that sentence.
Cap the number too. Two or three people at a time is most people's honest ceiling once you count your actual job. If somebody asks when you are full, say so and be useful in one move instead of vague in two: name a better person, or offer a single session with no strings.
None of this makes you less generous. What people remember is not the total hours you gave them. It is that you turned up on the day you said you would, which is the whole of what feeling supported is made from.
Monday: take the vaguest mentoring promise you currently have open and turn it into a date and a subject.
– Asael Shinder
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