Your mentee spends the first twenty minutes of the call on one person. A teammate who rewrote their pull request without asking, then mentioned it at stand up as if it were a favour. Since then the two of them have barely spoken. Every story your mentee tells now has this person in it somewhere, usually as the reason something went wrong.
You will feel two pulls. One is to agree, because you only have their side and they are hurting. The other is to fix it, by having a quiet word with someone. Resist both. Agreeing hardens the story, and stepping in behind their back takes away the one thing they most need to practise, which is handling it themselves.
Start by helping them separate what happened from what it meant. Write down the events, as a camera would have recorded them. They rewrote the change. They mentioned it at stand up. Then, separately, the meaning your mentee gave it. They think I am not good enough. They wanted to look better than me. Often the events are smaller than the meaning, and seeing the two side by side is a relief.
Then ask about the other person's week. What were they under pressure from? Was a deadline close, a reviewer impatient, a manager asking about that change? This is not about excusing anything. It is about making the other person a person again, rather than a character in a story.
Ask your mentee what their own part might be. Gently, and only once the first heat has gone. Had the pull request been waiting a long time? Had they said they would finish it and gone quiet? Most falling outs have two authors, even when one wrote more of it.
Then help them plan one short conversation, in private, about the future rather than the past. Next time you want to change something in my work, could you message me first? I would rather fix it myself and learn from it. Rehearse it with them until it sounds like a request, not a charge.
If the behaviour continues after that, it becomes something to raise with their manager, with dates and examples. Most of the time it does not get that far.
– Asael Shinder
