What it's like to be reverse mentored by a millennial
Millennial moment - the business of a generation: The FT's Emma Jacobs has a reverse mentoring session with Gemma Sole of the School for CEOs, discussing generational differences when it comes to work and money
Produced, filmed and edited by James Sandy and Joe Sinclair
Transcript
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What is reverse mentoring? In a nutshell, it's the opposite of traditional mentoring. So it's when you have someone who's less senior in an organisation sharing their perspectives with someone who's more senior to them.
Hi, how are you doing?
How are you?
Nice to meet you.
You too. You too. So, what are your perceptions of millennials? Do you work with many millennials on a daily basis?
Yeah, I write enough about them to think that they don't live up to the stereotype. I don't think they're all eating avocados. I think they want the same things as other people want too like money, security of income, somewhere to live.
OK, nice, because I was hoping that we wouldn't have those kind of stereotypes to come in. Do you ever feel that you're looking at work emails and stuff like that on the weekends?
Yeah, constantly.
Yeah, how is that for you?
Yeah, it's terrible.
It makes you kind of not focused on any one thing, either home or work. So I actually have to turn off my work phone and leave it in a drawer over the weekend and then go back to it on Monday morning.
We talk about getting that balance, and I think millennials are quite good at it. When we leave work, we leave work. We don't take bits of work home with us as much as other generations. Getting that downtime really helps you to recover and be energised when you go into work the next day.
But you see, sometimes I get frustrated because I kind of think, well, why don't you write that at the weekend or something, or why don't you -
Why should they write at the weekend?
Because it's a chance to prove themselves beyond their normal job, I suppose. And that's what other people have had to do.
That's an interesting one though, because just because that's what someone else had to do, does that mean that is was right?
No.
Is that actually healthy for the individual and for the organisation if people are working weekends? We have weekends for a reason, don't we? You need the time with your family or to recover from whatever it is you've been slaving away on during the week. So that's important time.
So you win a million pounds. What are you going to do with it?
Well, I don't want to get the sack tomorrow, but I think that I would give work up, or at least put a pause on it. I'd take a sabbatical. It might just give me a chance to break the routine.
I think I would do a sabbatical as well. So I would get debt free because I'd have so much money I wouldn't know what to do with it. So I would get debt free. I would enjoy having that almost like a top up to my salary so I could go and explore.
A small top up.
Yeah. So it would be like a bit of a fun fund.
So if I was managing you, what difference might that make to my view of you or my millennial workforce do you think?
I think there's a tendency to live in the present. And I think one thing that we're not that good at that other generations are is planning our futures. And that gives you flexibility to - because you're open to new opportunities and offers, but it also means that you can kind of walk through without a huge amount of direction, which can be a risk. You need to have aspirations and career ambitions. And I think that can be a challenge for managing millennials.