#169 👩💼 Mentoring Beats Managing
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a month.
Today, you’ll learn why mentoring beats managing thanks to REWORK.
Managing is easy. Mentoring is hard. One tells people what to do. The other teaches them how to think for themselves.
At 37signals, mentoring is about transferring values, taste, and decision-making frameworks, so the business scales without losing its soul.
If you’re still spending your time directing traffic instead of developing judgment in others, you’re not leading. You’re babysitting.
Let’s fix that.
The role of mentoring is to teach
In order to be as small as we are and as efficient as we are, we have to have similar values and taste.
And part of that mentorship relationship is to teach the values that we, as more senior people, have learned at 37signals.
Mentors help people to make decisions that are consistent with those values.
You're trying to make your role as a mentor obsolete, so they don't need you anymore.
It has a lot of parallels to parenting. You can't force your children to do things. You hope that when you're not around, they'll make good decisions that are consistent with the values you've taught them.
You need to be able to trust that people will be able to make their own decisions that are consistent with the product and produce really high quality stuff.
Jeffrey Hardy
Why it matters
Managing creates dependency.
Mentoring creates autonomy.
Without strong mentorship, you become a bottleneck. Every decision flows back to you. Every problem lands in your inbox.
But when you focus on mentoring, people stop asking, “What should I do?” and start showing you what they’ve already figured out. Here’s why it matters:
Preserve your culture. Mentoring embeds your values deep into the DNA of your business.
Unlock scale. You can’t personally approve every decision at 50, 100, or 1,000 people. Mentorship makes you irrelevant - in the best way.
Build better products. When people learn how to think like founders, they make smarter, higher-quality decisions.
Next steps
Here’s how to build a culture of mentorship:
Transfer taste, not tasks. Don’t just review work. Involve people early. Explain why you make the calls you make. Debate. Teach.
Codify your values. Define what “good” looks like. Share examples. Set standards. Help your team learn how to decide, not just what to do.
Kill the safety nets. Stop solving everyone’s problems. Push people to bring solutions, not questions. Let them stumble - that’s when learning happens.
Exit the loop. If the same people keep coming to you, you’re the problem. Ask yourself: “Why haven’t I taught them how to handle this without me?”
Your thoughts
Want to connect? Connect on LinkedIn or Twitter
Want to advertise? Click here