and is in a different group. I am simply his senior mentor that he can vent to and check in with. Our company has this mentor/mentee program and it's been a great outlet for newer employees to vent to someone in confidence and get some advice.

Anyway, he just texted and asked if we could catch up. He had just met with his manager and gotten some negative feedback for the first time, and it surprised him. Turns out that his productivity (calls/meetings) have been low in May and his manager brought that to his attention and told him he needs to get that up, especially because his sales have also been low. He agreed that at the very least he needs good productivity to at least show he is working hard despite not having the sales numbers he wants.

But then he said he requested a week off in October to go to a friend's weeding in S. America and was denied because he has already maxed out vacation time for the year. Mind you he's only been at our company for six months. He was super frustrated that his manager wouldn't let him book the vacation time know that he will have accrued enough by then and was asking if he should take it to HR.

I had to delicately help him see it from his manager's point of view:

-You're new here
-Even though you're new, your sales have been very underwhelming which is usually forgivable for newer employees
-That would be forgivable IF you were doing all the other things, but in addition to low sales, your productivity has been really bad (worst on the team by far)
-In addition to all of this, you have already used all your vacation for the year as a new employee haha
-And now you're asking for another week off in October when it's one of the busiest months of the year for us and you don't even have the vacation time banked up yet, during the same meeting in which your manager has basically told you that you are sucking at your job

He still didn't fully get it.