the interns I’m mentoring don’t want my help

A reader writes:

I am mentoring my third summer intern (in a company program that assigns mentors and mentees), and I’m facing a frustrating trend: none of them seem to want my help.

I want to be a supportive mentor, but I keep running into walls. My current intern spends our 1-on-1s exclusively selling himself, never asking questions or listening. My previous intern refused to practice her end-of-summer presentation with me or take my feedback before pitching to executives. The intern before that turned down a great internal job interview because the role wasn’t “perfect.”

Given how tough the entry-level market is right now, I’m confused by the resistance. Is there a new professional dynamic with Gen Z interns that I’m failing to understand, or have I just hit a bizarre statistical anomaly? How do you mentor people who don’t seem to want it?

I don’t think it’s new — I’ve been getting letters with similar themes since time immemorial (i.e., 2007). It’s not generational; it’s about inexperience and lack of professional judgment borne of that inexperience.

When you initially meet with the interns, make sure you’re laying out what you can offer, how your meetings should work, and what you should both expect from the time together. (Ideally your company would also be doing that before these meetings ever happen.) From there, it’s really up to them whether they want to take advantage of the time.

It’s okay for the intern who didn’t want to practice her presentation or take your feedback to make that call — although at that point I’d ask her how the time could be useful to her and what she’d like to get out of your meetings.

With the guy who’s spending the time selling himself, interject!  You’re the mentor and you’re allowed to have input into how your time is used. It’s okay for you to say, “The best way for us to use this time is XYZ, so before we next meet, spend some time thinking about questions about your work or company culture that you’d like us to discuss.” And then if he keeps pitching himself anyway, you can interject and explicitly redirect him.

But also, talk to whoever organizes your company’s mentoring program and tell them what your experience has been so far. They may have guidance for how you should handle it, and they might want to be alerted when it happens so they can check in with the interns. They also might be able to change how they’re presenting the program so that interns are going in with a better understanding of how it’s expected to work.

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