From the perspective of a millennial. We are hungry for mentorship, actually, I'd go as far as saying mentorship is a necessity when we enter the workforce. I say this due to the recent study of the development on the young minds of today's youth (Emerging Adulthood Theory, Jeffrey Arnett). When you provide a mentoring relationship for a millennial you are building some scaffolding that is crucial to their professional development. Let's face it, as much as I love being a Millennial, and I say this by no means to banter my generation, we are not in the same mind set as a 26 year old, 20 years ago. Those of you who are from generation x or boomer generation, I'm sure can see the difference. For those Millennials out there that don't agree, look at the TV series "Friends" during season one, Ross was 26 years old, married and lived on his own- paying for rent, Monica, who was even younger, was also living on her own, paying for rent. Rachel just got married (to Barry) and Phoebe had gone through some pretty traumatic life experiences. Ok, so it's TV and how real is that-- but think about it? How many Millennials do you know are paying for their own rent right now? I'm sure there are some, but I'll be honest in saying the majority of my friends still live with their parents.
Back to addressing how to engage in meaningful mentoring with a generation gap, the most important factor to getting the support and buy-in from both the Millennial and Boomer is to set the corporate culture that it is valued and looked highly upon when our Boomers and Millennials are mentoring each other. Once you set he stage (culture) to embrace these kinds of relationships, there's no hiding or pointing fingers, there's no pre-conceived expectations of what the relationship is suppose to look like, and lastly there is no resentment/shame for entering a mentoring relationship.
Once your culture embraces mentoring, everyone will want to be apart of it! ...
Read the rest of my response HERE.
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