A set of experiments asked whether people want to be told about the smudge on their face. They do. Almost nobody tells them.
Most mentees hold a comfortable theory without ever saying it out loud. If something were seriously wrong, my mentor would tell me. That is half the point of having one. So when sessions are pleasant, and comments are mild, the natural conclusion is that things are going rather well.
The theory has one weakness. It assumes your mentor is willing to say the uncomfortable thing. In 2022, a team of researchers at Harvard and Berkeley looked for people willing to do exactly that and found very few.
The smudge test
Before the main experiments, the researchers ran a small and slightly mischievous pilot. A research assistant handed out surveys in a busy campus center with a visible mark on her face, chocolate in some cases and lipstick in others. Of the people who took the survey, 155 said afterward that they had noticed something on her face. Four of them mentioned it.
Five experiments followed, with nearly 2,000 participants. People imagined or recalled workplace moments when one person could give another constructive feedback: a typo in a report, a rude-sounding email, a stain before an interview. In the most telling study, pairs practiced a short speech for a competition with a prize at stake, and the listener could give the speaker feedback before the final round.
The result was the same every time. Givers underestimated how much the other person wanted to hear it. This held even between friends, roommates and romantic partners, people who presumably know each other quite well. And the speakers who received more feedback improved more between practice and the final.
The awkward detail is where the gap was widest. People were most reluctant in exactly the situations where the feedback mattered most. Food on a face was relatively easy to mention. An error in a report was much harder.
Why your mentor is keeping quiet
Reluctance was strongest among people who expected the conversation to be uncomfortable, or who doubted the feedback would do much good. Neither belief tends to be accurate. Both are very common.
Now add the mentoring relationship. Your mentor is senior, generous with their time and probably fond of you. They have every social reason to keep the sessions warm and no obligation to make them awkward. They will not be writing your performance review, so there is no formal moment that forces the difficult sentence out. The things they notice and leave unsaid simply accumulate.
Which means a mentor's silence carries very little information. It might mean all is well. It might equally mean they have seen the spinach and decided, kindly, to let you find it yourself. Usually in a meeting with someone more important.
What to do differently
Tell them you want it. The researchers' own remedy was a single question for the giver: if you were this person, would you want to know? Most people said yes, and became more willing to speak. You cannot make your mentor run that exercise, but you can remove the guesswork. Say early, and more than once, that you would rather hear the uncomfortable version.
Ask about something specific. "Any feedback for me?" is the easiest question in the world to answer with a pleasantry. A question about a particular meeting, decision, or piece of work is much harder to wave away.
Treat praise-only sessions as a prompt. If three sessions in a row have produced nothing but encouragement, the likeliest explanation is not that you are flawless. Ask what they would do differently in your seat.
Reward the first difficult comment. How you react the first time decides whether there is a second. Thank them, ask a follow-up question, and visibly act on it.
Notice your own silence. You sit in the giving seat too. If something in the relationship isn't working for you, research suggests your mentor wants to know more than you assume.
The awkward conclusion
In Chapter 8 of The Accidental Mentee, the cure for vague feedback starts before the session, with the ask. Sarah, a UX designer, ends a session with "Any feedback for me?" and gets forty seconds of encouragement about empathy with the user. By Monday, she cannot reconstruct a word of it. Rewind, and she arrives instead with a five-minute prompt about how she handled pushback in Tuesday's design review, asking for coaching rather than evaluation. Her mentor thinks for much longer, and Sarah leaves with three sentences she still turns over a week later. The mentor did not change. The question did.
The book then adds the step most mentees skip. Feedback is run through three tests within twenty-four hours: Is it true? Is it useful? Is it mine to act on? Whatever survives is tried at low volume, and the next session opens with a short report on what happened. A mentor who sees their feedback used offers more of it, and with more candor. That is how the spinach eventually gets mentioned.
Your mentor probably wants to tell you more than they do. You probably want to hear more than they assume. Two well-meaning people, each waiting politely for the other, can end up with a mentoring relationship that's admirably cordial and almost entirely useless.
So check your teeth. Then ask.
Source
Nicole Abi-Esber et al., "'Just Letting You Know …' Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 123, no. 6 (2022): 1362–85, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000393.
