Why Company Mentorships Are A Great Idea
As Baby Boomers and Gen Xers start to leave leadership positions to Millennials, the current workplace climate seems a tad mixed. Sure, you have upstanding, success-driven veterans still producing their best work, but you also have newcomers with booming ideas and little experience. What do you do with such an age gap? Use it to your advantage! Here’s why you should create a mentorship program in your office that will make the best out of your age gap:
Mentorships will speed up the learning process
Now, if you can put veteran employee and a younger employee on a project that has room more innovation, do it! Why? Because it’ll teach both employees something new. Sure, the younger employee will come in with a million new ways to approach the project. But the veteran employee will tell stories of past innovations, what’s worked and hasn’t worked, plus everything that needs to be changed in their opinion. Two complementary minds will surely produce something unique. Plus, both will learn from the process.
Mentorships attract younger employees
While you’d think Millennials and the next generation of employees would love to set their sights on all new processes, they surprisingly do like learning from their “elders”. Why is that? Because they want to learn the system either way. Many smart new employees know that the way towards innovation is to learn the system first, then subsequently create ways to break it. Also, any young and hungry employee just wants to move up the ladder, so any chance to be around seasoned professionals is a win in their eyes.
Mentorships encourage retention
Now of course, here’s a huge reason. Many mentorships are a way to prepare younger employees to take leadership roles in the company. Employees who have learned from experienced professionals and can eventually apply that to creative new ideas are gamechangers in your company. Not only will they respect your company’s history, but they’ll know the ins and outs better than a newly hired manager ever will.
31
Mar
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