>>That's the main thing to me. Why waste people's time on known dead ends when you can fail on things that matter, together?
People learn differently from experience than they do from being told something.
>>It seems self-centered to think that the best way to learn is to make the same mistakes that you did yourself.
That's the thing though: people rarely make the same mistakes as you did. They tend to make different mistakes, and fail differently, with different results and consequences. By serving the solution to them on a silver platter, you're robbing them of very valuable learning opportunities.
A mentor's job is to use their experience to guide the employee and help them figure out how to avoid mistakes. And if they do make a mistake, then the mentor is there to help them recover. The recovery is followed by by what I call "lesson time", which is a judgment-free session where we discuss why the incident or failure happened and come up with actionable steps to prevent it from happening again.
If you find yourself in situations where you absolutely have to tell someone how to do something because failure would be fatal, at that point you should do that thing yourself, and have the employee watch you do it and take notes. That's another type of mentorship that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but it can be extremely valuable.