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Mentoring and Baby Boomers

Today, in our love affair with what’s new, what’s cutting edge, and what’s technologically cool, it’s easy to forget that knowledge also comes with experience. It may require a few hours of e-training or a semester-long course to learn how an energy pump operates, but it takes years and years of experience to recognize the sounds of a pump that is not operating properly. The only way to shorten that learning cycle is to have someone with more experience help to accelerate learning.

Businesses idolize youth and technological savviness. Firms recruit new (and less expensive) talent in the belief that that’s the way to build a competitive edge. But companies also recruit and retain mature employees because of respect for their knowledge. The best companies today will help their organizations transform the way they think about all of their employees. Each person brings different knowledge to the organization. Each generation brings something different and valuable to your organizational operations.

We’ve worked with business people across generations for many years and whether you refer to their sharing of knowledge and information as love, passion, or, more traditionally, as mentoring, we’ve repeatedly tried to foster the powerful synergistic release of cross-generational sharing, learning, and performance.

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