my boss is also my mentor — when should I tell her I’m interviewing?

A reader writes:

I work at a public university and wasn’t actively looking for another position. Another department recently reached out to me about a management position that aligns well with my long-term career goals and encouraged me to apply. I decided it was worth exploring, and I’ve now been invited to interview.

I’m conflicted because I don’t see my supervisor as only my boss anymore. Over the past several years, she has become my mentor as well. She has trusted me with increasingly complex work, encouraged my professional growth, given me opportunities to lead projects, and invested a great deal of time in developing me. I genuinely respect and appreciate everything she has done for me.

My original plan was to tell her before interviewing. I wanted to come to her as a mentor, explain I had been approached, and ask for her advice. I wanted her to hear it from me because I value our relationship.

Then I spoke with a former coworker who had the same supervisor. She accepted another internal position and stayed on temporarily to help with the transition while starting her new role. Although she said my manager was initially supportive, she felt their relationship changed during the transition and advised me not to say anything unless I became a finalist or had an offer.

I followed that advice, but now I’m second-guessing myself. I think what bothers me most isn’t that I’m interviewing. It’s that I feel like I missed the opportunity to approach her first as my mentor. If I wait until later in the process, I worry that instead of asking for her guidance, I’ll simply be informing her as my manager that I may be leaving. At the same time, I know an interview doesn’t necessarily lead to an offer, and I didn’t want to create unnecessary uncertainty if nothing came of it.

Did I make a mistake by not talking to her before interviewing? More broadly, when someone is both your manager and your mentor, should that change how you handle an internal opportunity? Should you approach them first as a mentor, or is it more appropriate to wait until there is a realistic possibility that you’ll actually leave?

You should wait until you’re ready to tell her you’re moving on (or until your employer’s policies require that she be informed, which may happen earlier).

Your manager can play a mentorship role with you, but ultimately she’s first and foremost your manager. The things you described her doing — giving you increasingly complex work, encouraging your professional growth, offering opportunities to lead projects, and investing time in developing you — are all things a good manager does. That doesn’t mean you can’t see her as something of a mentor, but she’s still your boss, and she still has a lot of power over what your experience at work is like. It doesn’t make sense to stir up the tensions and weird feelings that can come from alerting your boss that you’re job searching before you have another offer and have decided to take it.

There are some exceptions to that. There are managers who have demonstrated that they won’t make it weird. But even then, you have the right to be uncertain about that and to choose to protect yourself by not sharing the info until you have something actionable to report. (And really, you potentially put her in a tough spot if you share it earlier anyway — most of the ways she could act on the info are things you’d probably rather she not do until you’ve decided to leave for sure.)

I think you’re feeling like you’re somehow violating her trust in you by not telling her earlier, but you really aren’t. If you do decide to leave, or if you reach a point in the process where she needs to be informed, at that point you can explain that you weren’t looking but they approached you and you wanted to explore it but didn’t want to worry her until things got to a more serious point (since it might have gone nowhere or you might have decided you weren’t interested). If she’s really worthy of the trust you’re putting in her as a mentor-type figure, she’ll get that. She might be disappointed to lose you — and might not even have a perfect initial reaction because she’s human — but she’ll get it.

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my boss wants me to tell her when I’m looking for a new job