Caroline Slee-Poulos and Ron talk about Mentoring in the workplace

So that's a rather large subject, mentorship. And I'm going to start it on the basis that in school, we have teachers who are our mentors. In business, we have what we call supervisors, foremen, managers, executives. There are mentors, but the leadership in a business is not specifically trained in mentoring like a teacher is. What do you think the characteristics, qualities are that would allow somebody to be a good mentor for somebody else?

It's interesting that you use the term onboarding, that to me, companies that have put onboarding programs in place have recognized and acknowledged that something needs to be done for a new employee when they arrive the first day. I still remember the first day. On my first job, which was working with delinquent kids, where I was given a house that had 12 boys and had all of them there, but one had been arrested and sentenced, eight of whom were murderers, three were armed robbers, and one was youth protection. He had been taken away from his family because one was a prostitute and the other was a drug pusher. And I was brought to the house and introduced to the boys. And that was it. And I'm a mathematics and physics major. And I'm all of a sudden a custodian of a building with 12 young adults in it.

Okay, so let me go forward. Again, personal experience. My grandmother, my parents both worked. My mother was a teacher. My father was an engineering clerk, a technician. And so my grandmother was the one that raised me for the first roughly four years of my life. My sister, the same type of circumstance. Well, my grandmother had to deal with my... sister, when she started running around, I was three. So the answer for her was to send me off to kindergarten. Now, she was a teacher, had been involved in education her whole life. So she convinced the school to let me go to kindergarten one year early. In fact, it was closer to two, which is why I was so young all the way through my education. But I failed kindergarten. I repeated kindergarten. I call it failed. They had me repeat it because of my age. It wasn't because I wasn't skilled. So that onboarding was interesting. Then I come to work and I get assigned a task for a contract for one year in fixing a computer system and how it managed parts inventory. And the senior consult of the firm that. convinced the dealership to buy this particular package. His name was David Steele, spent one day a week with me, eight hours a week, teaching me, talking with me, walking me through what this was, how it worked, why it worked, all the rest of that nonsense. I couldn't script that kind of training, onboarding, mentoring. And about four months later, I was down at It was a Caterpillar dealer I started with, and I was down at Caterpillar, and I ran into two gentlemen. One's name was Larry Noy, and the other guy's name was Bob Kirk, both of whom, for some strange reason, took my young self into their wings, and they mentored me, one in computers and the other in parts management. And Bob Kirk was kind of a legend in the parts world. And Larry Noe was one of the very first employees of dealer data processing at Caterpillar. And he was a special person. So I was blessed with, in that particular evolution, four people that were mentoring me, my grandmother, David Steele, Larry Noe, and Bob Kirk. Today, somebody comes into a dealership, and I don't know that that happens. And the other side of that is I don't know who's been trained to be a mentor. Because as you're indicating, some teachers are great in math. Some teachers are great in English. You can't be all things to all people. So here comes a person. Well, the old days walking you around. Here's the bathrooms. Here's where we have lunch. Here's the time. Here's where you park. Here's your desk. That's not enough. Here's your job. Here's how you progress. Here's who you work with. Here's whose work you receive. Here's who receives the work you do. Here's how you fit into the whole process. I still don't think we do that well. I don't know how we change that. I tend to acknowledging that we need to have people mentoring others.

Just having somebody that you can talk with about the frustrations, the problems, the obstacles, that trial by fire thing where you picked up the phone and called around. Today, the excuse is we've got Google. You can just look it up on Google, see what you have to do. But it's really a very... Very important job function. Imagine you've just finished technical school and you are hired at a dealership, automotive, on highway, material handling, construction, mining, whatever. And you go into the shop. You've got your own toolbox. You've got your old tools. That's required for you to bring them. That's a heck of an investment. And somebody's going to take you. They're either going to give you a bay or assign you to work with another technician. In the old days, you had somebody come in and that one employee was shared between two senior technicians, what they call lovingly journeyman technicians. And it was using the low-skilled person to leverage the high skills. In other words, the high-skilled person didn't need to do the low-skilled jobs because the apprentice did. And those two older guys, I'm assuming they're older. mentored, coached, taught the rookie. That was really cool. It worked really well. It stopped. It stopped because somebody along the way decided they're going to charge the same for a helper as they did for the journeyman. When the helper is only contributing at a level of perhaps 50% of the productivity level of the senior technician and the marketplace. made the determination, well, wait a second, you guys are too expensive. So they went somewhere else. That's the failure of mentorship not being implemented properly. So there's good news, bad news all the way down through all of these things, as in everything in life. But mentoring somebody has become more critical than at any other time at all. If you think about sports, athletics, use football as an example, use soccer. European football or the rest of the world football. There's a farm club. There's a group of people that are waiting. And there's training camp once a year. And the rookies, you've got 100 people going for 40 jobs. And you've got a guy who's been with me five years,10 years,15 years. He's been a star at his position. But every year, there's somebody coming in there to challenge his job, to make sure that you're doing as good a job as conceivably possible. That's a different kind of mentoring, but it's still mentoring. It's telling that senior guy, you got to continue to perform, babe. It's telling the young guy, I got a pass for you to replace him. And mentoring in technical terms, mechanics, reasonably straightforward. Office, not so much. Sales, yeah, we'll travel with a salesman. We'll listen. We'll try and grow it by. breathing the same air, but unless you're going to a school by Don Buttrey in sales management, unless you're using some specific sales training programs, you're trial by fire. Here's your customers, go for it. And typically they're small customers. So if you make a mistake or you mess up, there's not a big penalty for anybody, the employee or the company. That's a very poor way of mentoring somebody, I would submit. It's the same thing with coaching, Caroline. We need more people to coach other people on performance, on life skills. Mentoring is part of learning, isn't it? Mentoring is part of helping people achieve their potential. It's all part and parcel of the whole thing that we put learning together, learning without scars together with. It doesn't stop. At 50 years old, there should still be somebody mentoring you. There's got to be an exit strategy. How do people go into retirement? It's everything's a transition, isn't it?

Yeah, it's interesting as well to the generations. greatest generation to the Silas generation to the boomers to the millennials, blah, blah, blah. And everybody in the boomers and the older generation saying these young people, they're so impatient. They don't want to work. They just want to get in the corner office, make a lot of money. And I asked them, do you remember when you started? Do you remember what you thought of the people that were doing the job, the older people that were doing the job? And I had a guy that I worked with by the name of Ray Roberts, who followed me from Montreal to Edmonton to Denver before he retired. And we're having dinner one night, our wives and Ray and I, and we were talking about something relating to mentorship and working. And I said to Ray, I said, well, I wasn't that hard to work with, was I? And he started laughing almost to the point of wetting his pants. He said, you were impossible. He said it was unbelievable. There was nothing that we did that you didn't say. Why do you do it that way? Why do you do that? And so the young people come in now that I'm in my 70s and they they challenge their boss who's in their 50s or 60s. Why do we do it that way? And the boss shuts them down. Doesn't explain why. Doesn't engage in a discussion. They just shut them down. That's the way we do it around here. Shut up and do it. There's too much of that. Breaking out of that is everything that we're trying to do. And, you know, our accreditation as a learning provider for the as an education facility with IASET has allowed us to become much more involved in people's lives insofar as our classes all earn CEUs, which apply as credits at universities, technical schools around the world. And we're the only ones in the industry that have that accreditation. There's certifications and associations, different manufacturers. None of them are real. They're certified for that particular group. We have a much bigger responsibility. And as a result of that, our influence on mentorship, I think, is greater. With good mentors, employees will blossom and flourish and reach their potential. Without good mentors, they're going to leave. I mean, it's no... And it's very hard to find talented employees today. What have we missed on mentorship?

Yeah, good point.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not the only one that walks around. You're not privy to all of the information on the planet. You don't walk around with all the infinite knowledge. You have to learn from others. You have to share. You have to be open. And that takes us to the next part of, you know, there's a group of people that will not share their knowledge. I'm not going to share that with you. You'll know more than I do at that point. I tease people, you know, I'm not going to tell you. Then you'll be smarter than me and I'm done. But we need people that can transfer their knowledge, their information, their experience to others as part of their job, as part of their life. I think we beat up mentorship pretty well, don't you?

So at that, let's close off this Lessons Learned. Thank you, Caroline, for contributing and being a party to this discussion. And thank all of you for listening to this podcast. I look forward to having you with us on another Lessons Learned in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.