You gave someone a clear suggestion. You were right, you were kind about it, and a month later they have done something else entirely.
The reflex is to feel a little dismissed. Push that down, because what has actually happened is that you were handed information, and it is better information than agreement would have been.
Start with the obvious possibility: there was a constraint you could not see. You do not sit in their standups. You do not know that the person you told them to talk to had just given notice, or that their team lead had already ruled the approach out in a meeting you were not in, or that the two weeks you assumed they had were spent on an escalation. Mentors give advice from a model of someone's situation that is always a few weeks out of date and missing about half the detail. When your advice bounces, the model is usually the thing that was wrong.
The second possibility is that the advice was fine and they were not ready to act on it. Being told to speak up in reviews is easy to understand and hard to do. If you take the non compliance as a challenge and repeat yourself louder, you turn a growth problem into an obedience problem, and you make it harder for them to tell you the truth next time.
So ask rather than press. What made you go a different way. Say it flat, with genuine curiosity, no edge in it. You will get either a constraint you did not know or an honest fear, and both are more useful to you than a followed instruction.
Then remember whose career it is. You are a source of input, not a manager, and even a manager does not get to run someone's decisions. The measure of good mentoring is not how often your suggestions get implemented. It is whether the person is deciding better than they were six months ago, with reasons they can explain.
The mentee who quietly does everything you say is not necessarily the one you are helping most. Sometimes they have just stopped thinking, and you are the reason.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)