Generations@Work

This past Monday I saw Stonehenge for the first time. It was a picture perfect early fall day in the countryside southwest of London, with a luminous royal blue sky, and a brisk wind rolled down the browning plains that form the backdrop for this famously mysterious prehistoric monument. Despite my mind’s recognition that we (my wife Paula was with me) were present as tourists; as I circled Stonehenge close enough to wonder at the practical feat of its construction, the place evoked a certain Tirnagog-esque timelessness.

I was in England attending a retreat of geoscientists employed by one of the largest energy companies in the world. This was the annual gathering of the leaders of the company’s geoscience team. They met at Bishopstrow House, a beautiful but somewhat dated country manor just twenty kilometers from Stondhenge. The central topic: how to atrract, retain, and motivate the next generation of scientists. This is where I came in. My role as the plenary speaker was to offer some of the big picture thinking about the “generations question” and to offer my thoughts on retention and motivation as a way to stimulate conversation and dialogue.

Of the twenty attendees, all but two were self-identified “Boomers”; one obvious reason to be thinking hard about retention. A late afternoon brainstorming session revealed a lot of concerns about mentoring. Many of the participants felt strongly that mentoring successfully was one big piece of the retention puzzle. What, though, constitutes good mentoring?

Guiding a young career is certainly one part of mentoring. Offering new and younger recruits practical advice on how to navigate byzantine layers of bureaucracy, without reverting to mayhem or simply walking off the job, is another suitable topic. There were lots of other worthy ideas and suggestions but they shall remain the purview of those attending the meeting.

There is, though, one additional insight that I can pass along because in a way it is mine and it came out of the after-dinner conversation (isn’t this almost always where the good stuff comes up?). Anyways, there I was surrounded by some of the best geoscientists in the world. I posed the question; what does it take to do your job - that is, the job of finding new and presumably untapped sources of energy - really well? Naturally there was a lot of discussion about technology, but the rest of the answer surprised me. I might sum it up as the “boots on the ground” view. In other words, the consensus at the dinner table was that success is a function of great technology combined with all of the senses and all of one’s experience in the field; the place where senses and technology converge. Translation for young scientists: Get out there and get your boots dirty.

How does this relate to good mentoring? Here’s my interpretation. A good mentor first and foremost encourages opportunities for new hires to get close to the product, and even closer to the customer, as often as possible. This is where the real learning takes place. And the role of the mentor is to help the new hire(s) make sense of her or his experiences. A good mentor helps to structure real learning and then follows through with the reflexive part of this experiential learning process.

It is by this process that experience becomes learning and learning becomes knowledge. Good mentoring goes beyond the issue of generational differences and recognizes the importance of wisdom and the value of the timeless. Good mentors simultaneously pass on and affirm hard won life lessons. Good mentoring helps the relatively uninitiated navigate and negotiate, but it also reminds the novice that a part of our collective knowledge is timeless, carried and transported by generations as a gift, just as thousands of years ago generations carried blue stone to Stonehenge as a gift to the ages.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Future of Work, Human Resources, Education & Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.