WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT
Finding Success with Cross- Generational Mentoring
By Tom Gresham
senior executive identifying shortcom- ings she identified in the firm’s workplace culture and offering ideas for how to address them. In response, the executive established standing, one-on-one meetings with Tardy to pick her brain and discuss her ideas. Some of her suggestions were implemented. The executive easily could have dismissed
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Tardy’s memo as the work of a naive neo- phyte, but instead he saw the value in a different perspective unique to a younger generation. The result was not only im- provements to the workplace but the ac- celerated development of a talented young worker and her strengthened engagement with the company. The partnership was not a formal mentorship, but it ultimate- ly served as a type of cross-generational mentorship that worked in both directions:
50 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE MARCH/APRIL 2018
hen Ann Tardy was a young employee of a large accounting firm, she wrote a memo to a
Tardy learned from the executive and the executive learned from her. “I was never going to miss those appoint-
ments, and neither was he,” said Tardy, who is now CEO of LifeMoxie, which helps organi- zations develop and manage strategic mentor- ing programs with custom mentoring software and consulting services. “We treated them as important because they were important.” Cross-generational mentorship empha-
sizes pairing a member of one generation with someone from a different generation. Typically, this means arranging for lon- ger-tenured executives to offer guidance and advice to more junior employees from a position of authority. While cross-gen- erational mentoring can encompass that standard relationship, some experts such as Tardy tout forms of cross-generational mentorships that allow younger workers to offer their perspectives and guidance to their more senior colleagues—and for
those senior colleagues to listen and learn from them. Mentorships are prevalent in corporate
America. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 companies have a mentorship program, according to the Association for Talent Di- versity. However, forms of cross-generation- al mentoring that emphasize the younger generation’s insight are still rarely found in workplaces, Tardy said. “Traditional mentoring is so ingrained in
people’s minds that they don’t really even consider that is an option,” Tardy said. “But it offers so many benefits and I really wish that we would do more of it. So often it’s got to be the tenured senior individual who is mentoring a member of a younger genera- tion. If people would just realize how much is offered in the opposite direction as well, then they would place more importance on it.” In general, Rebekah Kowalski, vice president of ManpowerGroup’s global
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