On Mentoring…

I saw this sign on a door of a local diner in the Catskills, and it just resonated with me for some reason.

I love the idea of an employer… defending (?) their employees, especially newer employees. We all want young people to get jobs and be productive members of society, but some customers can just be mercilessly critical and impatient.

Maybe this is just my advancing age talking, but I’m getting to a point where I feel like it’s my (our) responsibility to help develop the next generation. It’s so easy to post memes implying (or outright stating) the advantages of age and experience, but it’s less easy to roll your sleeves up, take a deep breath, and patiently teach something.

One of my daughters just graduated from nursing school and started work at the NICU in the local hospital. She’s 23-years-old, and she went to work alongside nurses who have been on that same unit for longer than she’s been alive. It would have been so easy for them to let her fend for herself, but the older nurses just did an amazing job of taking her under their wing and bringing her along. (Thanks Ashley Wenger-Slaba,!)

Clearly, in a NICU, the stakes are very high, and there’s a general sense of mission, but why aren’t we just doing this as a point of basic humanity and goodwill? I’ve talked here before about how I’ve avoided management for my entire career, and I genuinely feel some guilt for that. In some ways, maybe I was avoiding the unavoidable tedium and messiness that comes with mentoring.

I might be getting a little too reflective here, but I had three hours of driving after seeing that sign, and I got to wondering how valuable it would be if apprenticing the next generation of employees was something we all accepted as a personal debt and responsibility.

(FYI: The diner was called “Sundaes,” off Route 23 in Grand Gorge, New York. The sign outside said: “Best Burger in the Catskills.” Their bacon cheeseburger was the ONLY burger I had in the Catskills, so I can’t compare it to anything, but it was objectively stellar.)