my boss asked me to mentor my coworker, but it’s really my boss who needs mentoring

A reader writes:

About three years ago, we had a new manager start at my job, Fergus. Fergus is a very nice guy, but has never been a manager before. He delegates some of his core tasks to us, and seems to struggle with things like project management, clear and proactive communication, and HR-type stuff. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when he has a tricky situation, he will come to me and ask my opinion on how to handle it, and I coach him on what to say and what actions should come next. (Before I started here eight years ago, I’d been a department head at my previous company. That place was toxic as hell, and I happily took a step down out of management to get out of there.)

Two weeks ago, Fergus asked me to be a mentor to one of my colleagues, Chip. Please note that there is no real hierarchy in our department; other than Fergus, we are all peers on the org chart. Chip is older than me, a gem, and also a bit quirky. Most of Fergus’s “what should I do?” questions in the past were in relation to Chip. We do very different jobs within the department, but I agreed to the mentorship as long as it was what Chip wanted. Chip just wants the drama to go away so he can focus on his work. All agreed to the mentorship.

For the last week, I’ve been talking with three people who Fergus told me had lodged serious complaints against Chip, so I could get an idea of what goals to work towards. The first person gave me a lot of valuable feedback about how, yes, there were some instances that Chip could have handled better, but a lot of the issues could be solved by having more consistent department procedures and communications tools. The second person had a lackluster interaction with Chip two years ago. They worked through the issues that led to the misunderstanding, and she showed me an email thread that showed the new procedures were working fine and she was satisfied. The third person had no idea why I was asking her questions. She had no issues with Chip or anyone in our department. She had never spoken to Fergus. As far as we can tell, a few weeks ago she was raging about a bad experience with an external vendor, and one of her office mates is Fergus’s spouse. (Many yikes happening here, and I had to reassure her that she had done nothing wrong and no one was in trouble.)

At this point, I think it’s clear that while Chip could use a bit of mentorship on “reading the room” and working with sensitive customers, most of the work really needs to happen with Fergus. We need better department procedures, and Fergus needs to work on his own leadership skills. He’s a nice guy and I think as much as he wants to do well here, he seems to have some sort of anxiety around HR-type things. These instances that are looming large in his mind are old news or nonexistent issues based on rumors and assumptions.

I agreed to the mentorship because, while I do believe that Fergus should be the one doing this in theory, I want Chip to stay and be successful and I don’t think that will happen if Fergus tries to mentor him. So … how do I “manage up” with Fergus? I just got done teaching my whole department about Change and Project Management because too many situations had happened because we lacked those processes. Now I’m doing HR type stuff. I’ve drawn the line that I’ll only interfere in management if it is negatively impacting me. I am looking for a script for how to talk to Fergus about his own leadership journey while also not becoming his mentor. I can’t go to my grandboss, because Fergus and his spouse are very well-connected and I don’t want to spend my political capital there. I just want to be left alone to do my work.

Nooo, don’t get involved in this at all. You’re not Chip’s manager, you’re not being paid to do this work, and the fact that Fergus would prefer not to do it and is bad at it doesn’t make it your job. If your company wants it to be your job, they need to pay you for it and give you a level of authority that would make this sort of coaching and intervention appropriate.

It’s not inherently inappropriate to be asked to coach or mentor a peer, but this is much more than that — it’s not appropriate for you to be digging into other people’s concerns about a peer, even though Fergus asked you to. That’s squarely Chip’s manager’s job. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a manager who’s willing or able to do it, but that doesn’t mean you should step up and do it yourself.

Tell Fergus you talked with the three people he suggested and learned that two of them didn’t have issues with Chip at all and the other raised issues that could be solved by more consistent department procedures and communications tools. Then say that in doing this, you realized that it didn’t feel appropriate for you to dig into a peer’s performance in that way and you’re not comfortable staying in that role for a peer, so you’re going to officially hand that responsibility back to Fergus.

If you’d like to do this stuff, you could say, “If at some point there’s room to create an additional manager role on the team to work on issues like this, I’d definitely be interested in being considered for that. But otherwise I realize I’ve overstepped and prefer to stick to being Chip’s peer.” If Fergus tries to tell you that you’re not overstepping because you deputized you to act in his place, you can say, “I appreciate you putting that trust in me. I’m really not comfortable doing that without formally having a job that would give me standing to do that kind of management with a peer. But if it’s an option to formalize that kind of arrangement, I’d love to talk about that.”

It is similarly not your job to talk to Fergus about his own leadership deficiencies. You can certainly flag that your team needs better processes for X or that situation Y is a problem, and if he expresses uncertainty about how to handle those things, there may be room to say at some point, “I know there are some great classes on management that HR has sent people to for things like this” (or something similar). But anything beyond that is getting into coaching Fergus on management, and that’s something that needs to come from above him. Not only is it inappropriate for you to try to do it from below, but if you did try, it’s likely to mean (a) tons of unpaid labor from you, (b) probably with very little payoff (because if Fergus hasn’t figured out after three years that he needs to learn to manage, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to cajole him into it from below), and (c) is highly likely to be a huge exercise in frustration because it will allow you to think this stuff might change when in fact very little probably will. (I have been in exactly those shoes before, and it is a fruitless, frustrating path that will suck out all your energy and not pay you for it.)

You said you just want to be left alone to do your work, and the good news is: you can be. But to do that, you need to decline Fergus’ attempts to delegate his management work to you, and you have to accept that the department is probably going to stay poorly run.

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