Hello All. We first put this piece out in 2020 during the early part of pandemic. Three years on, we noticed a renewed interest in it, with lots of you clicking to read it on our website. It seems to chime with people in the light of the latest set of challenges the economic and political world is throwing at us. So, we’re running it again – we hope you find it of value second time around.
Bravery and courage are central themes in so many books and films we have grown up with. The lion in The Wizard of Oz follows the yellow brick road in search of it, Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls on it to avenge his father’s murder and Jo March, in Little Women, bravely fights gender stereotyping to make her own way in life.
Leadership has always been associated with bravery but never more than now. As we enter the next stage of this new world, the pressure is on to maintain high performance, often in the face of significant challenge, profit and income shortfalls and uncertainty about the future. So maybe now is the time to think about what being brave really means in your role and how it may be different from relying on bravado.
First, some differentiating definitions:
Bravery is defined as courageous behaviour and character, whereas bravado is described as a bold manner intended to impress or intimidate.
You can see the problem here. Bravery is all about substance. It inspires belief and trust in leaders. Bravado may be motivating and exciting at first but lacks weight if not followed up with evidence, action and consistency from those who employ it. As the quote says – we need a backbone, not a wishbone.
So, when the pressure is on and whether you lead an organisation, section, team or project, how do you remain brave and avoid the bravado trap? Here are 3 ways.
We aren’t born brave – or maybe we are and life bashes it out of us. Either way, being brave is a choice. It’s scary at times, requires energy and effort. It means you feel the weight of responsibility to lead people relying on you to set the direction. But it is rewarding too and what we need from our leaders right now. Anyway, what’s the alternative – fake it til you make it? You may not make it.
It has been said that competition makes us faster but collaboration makes us better.
Collaboration means everyone can contribute: you get to use all the experience in your team, not just some of it. Not only does a collaborative culture enable you to ensure opportunities and risks are more transparent and manageable, it also makes work more enjoyable and satisfying.
Yet some organisations subtly discourage collaborative working even though they talk loudly about wanting it. Individual targets, lack of cross-departmental communication and rigid decision-making processes encourage people to compete and play their cards close to their chests. When your team members only look down at their own work and never glance to the left and right to see what others are up to and how they could add value, it is death to collaboration.
So, if you want a more collaborative work culture, you have to make some changes. We know - we’ve seen clients of ours make those changes. It doesn’t happen overnight and it does take repeated practice, but with time a collaborative spirit starts to spread. Here are some actions that definitely make an impact.
That’s not the whole story but it’s a start. We work with teams at all levels to help them develop collaborative working. It’s an art and a science, but luckily, it’s not rocket science.
A month of 4-day weeks due to national holidays (in the UK at least) is both a joy and a challenge. The joy of the extra day off and the challenge of getting 5 days’ work activity in to 4. After a particularly heavy week of meetings (for us and I suspect many others) it’s worth reflecting on our meeting behaviour.
It has been said that table manners make it easier to be welcomed to any table. The same could be said of meeting manners. And we seem to have forgotten ours. Sometimes. Maybe a bit more than sometimes.
Have you been at a meeting recently and experienced any of these:
Not only might you have seen them, you may have done them too – it’s hard to be alert and attentive at your 6th consecutive meeting of the day with other tasks needing your attention.
Let’s tackle the aforementioned online meeting bad habits.
Cameras off – it’s the equivalent of coming to an in-room meeting and sitting with your back to everyone. You might be able to hear everything but others don’t know if you are engaged or feel they can connect with you. If everyone there has “face fatigue” from so many meetings, consider a conference call instead where no one can see anyone and the expectation is different. Engage with your voices instead of your faces.
Cameras on but disappearing from view – is almost always down to long, long meetings with no breaks. Bring back the human element and break up long meetings with a chance to exit left for coffee, a loo visit and to pat the dog or feed the gerbil.
Eyes on other screens – agree a one device rule so everyone dispenses with the others, in the same way a well-run meeting in a room would dictate. Ditto to taking other calls, although a note in the chat to say when you have to unavoidably step out for a minute goes a long way.
Non-participation and looking bored – where the latter applies, we should cut some slack. Some people aren’t bored, they just have that kind of face when they’re concentrating. Also, if we were in a room together, we wouldn’t be endlessly staring at each other’s faces as we do when we’re on a virtual call. Non-participation, however, is different. Let’s set our meetings up with as few observers as possible. Everyone there should be able to play their part (and that includes speaking up at some point) or have the right to question why they are on the attendee list.
Late entries and early exits - whilst in-person meetings are not the answer to everything, they do seem to acknowledge we are human beings – with pauses, breaks and gaps built in for people to breathe before they go on to their next activity. We’ve been banging on about this in our blogs since late 2020 and we can confirm that clients who have adopted our “15-minute rule” or similar – not running meetings back-to-back – have seen more energy and engagement at gatherings as a result.
It helps if you and your fellow meeting colleagues make a commitment to behave on the screen as if you were all in the room. So, game face on, elbows off the table, no chewing with your mouth open and let’s tidy up our online meeting etiquette.
As a manager, it can be tricky to get the balance right in your management style. You want to be supportive and helpful to your team but you also want to stretch them. Research has shown that high-performance teams share a common mind-set. They are fully committed to supporting each other and they are prepared to challenge too. They do both because it leads them to better places. A supportive mind-set encourages listening, valuing the contribution of individuals, being inclusive, building trust, a good atmosphere and genuinely caring. A challenging mind-set encourages constructive debate, questioning, feedback, agreeing stretching goals, taking responsibility and holding self and others to account. It's a combined approach that’s hard to develop and maintain but is the only one that consistently delivers high performance and results. All this needs to come from and be role modelled by the team’s leader. So, if you are one, what example are you setting and if you’re not a manager but an important member of the team, what are you contributing?
Low in both
When there’s little support or challenge, the only place it leads to is apathy. The team does just enough to stay out of trouble, but it never invests in relationships or truly commits to the work. If you’re in a team like that and you can influence it, great. If you can’t – get out. You’ll learn little and achieve even less.
High in challenge, low in support
This leads to a stressful team environment. You have the push of the challenge without the pull of the support, so you start to create a team where everyone looks out for themselves, results are short term and development is random. This sort of team energy works for some, others will fall by the wayside. Either way people are in survival mode, which means you get into bad habits and long term it won’t get you the best results.
High in support, low in challenge
This is a great big gooey hug of a team mind-set where relationships are prioritised over results. As a manager you encourage care and kindness, as a team, you’re on each other’s side 24/7. It sounds good and it can feel good to be part of, but it lacks the challenge that pushes people to achieve more, find better ways, ask powerful questions, say what needs to be said and develop along the way. Teams in this shared mind-set can kid themselves they are high performing. They rarely are.
High in both
If consistent high performance is what you strive for, this is where you want to be. It’s easy to talk about but tough to do and requires real commitment from everyone. How do you know when you’re in it? You feel free enough to have the autonomy to act and connected enough to commit fully to the team’s results not just your own. You also feel a bit scared sometimes. You’re part of something really good and you don’t want to be the weak link. So, whether you’re the manager or a member of the team – you step up.
There are many practical ways to develop a high support/high challenge team mind-set. If that is where you’re headed but you need some extra ideas on how to get there quicker, talk to us about how you can lead your team to consistent high performance or be in a team that doesn’t accept mediocrity. We’ll happily spill the beans on what it takes and we’ll support and challenge you to get there.
Human beings love to categorise, don’t they? When we talk about generations, we are usually referring to our family, who fits where and how we can trace them back. Or we use it to complain about their music. When marketeers talk about generations, they mean people grouped together sharing birth years spanning 15-20 years who share certain characteristics. Based on the work of Neil Howe and William Strauss, the Generations help us understand people’s attitude to life, leisure and society and have an interesting application to work.
What were your early career drivers? If you’re a leader whose first thoughts are ambition, climbing the ladder, becoming a manager, responsibility and recognition, then there’s a good chance you occupy a different generation to the people you are now managing and the teams you now lead. Perhaps you are a Baby Boomer managing Millennials or a Gen X leading a team of iGens.
Our work world has understandably changed in the last three years and people now don’t want what they wanted before. Younger team members have their own set of drivers and include prioritising health and wellbeing over ambition. Older team members who took early retirement after the pandemic may well be on their way back in to work, having discovered they can’t make the finances stack up for a longer later life.
A lot has been written about The Talent Challenge and The Great Resignation and it’s depressing. The good news is there is a lot you can do to counter these trends.
The key is get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to recruit and retain and find ways to appeal to them. This involves thinking differently about what you can do to attract good people and keep them once you have them, during one of the biggest challenges ever faced in our work lifetime.
What got you here really won’t get them there anymore.
Humans eh? You think we’d have cracked this giving feedback thing by now. We start with the best intentions – give it often, be open to getting it back a bit too – yet when the pressure is on, we forget to make it a priority and fall back on pointing out the flaws in a rush and staying quiet when people do a good job. We also worry that we have don’t have the right to give feedback – to team members, colleagues and bosses. Not only is it our right to give it, it is their right to expect it and to give us feedback in return. It just needs to be done with a modicum of skill, compassion and common sense, especially when it comes to negative feedback.
The first thing is to examine your motive. What compels you to want to give negative feedback in the first place? A genuine desire to help someone grow and develop, the need to stop someone who is behaving in a way that is holding them back and a wish to tell someone something don’t do well and the negative impact it has so that they can change what they are doing for the better. These are all honourable motives and likely to result in constructively delivered feedback. A compulsion to get something off your chest or to take someone down a peg or two are less honourable (though understandably tempting at times) and more likely to lead to destructive feedback - and in the short term certainly, will do more harm than good.
Once you have your motive sorted, the next thing is to know the go-zones and no-go zones for negative feedback. Stay away from feedback directed at someone’s personality and values. No matter how much of a wordsmith you are, this kind of feedback feels personal and is tough to change and so fits in to the no-go zones for feedback. Then there are our attitudes - our approach to and views on things - and our behaviour - the outward signs of our attitude. These are the go-zones for negative feedback. They concentrate on what we are doing, not who we are, are easier on the ear and more likely to be acted upon. It's the difference between telling someone you desk share with (a real possibility these days with more flexible work spaces) that their messy papers, Post It note pandemic and non-existent filing make it impossible for you to work and can you both sort out a better system - constructive - and telling them they are a messy slob with no idea how to organise themselves and would they do this at home? - destructive.
A lot has been written about techniques and structures for feedback. Take them with a pinch of salt. In some cases, it would be a start just to get people doing feedback at all, let alone trying to weave it around some fancy process.
In particular, beware the unsubtle ones like the Praise Sandwich (and yes it has another title too). The idea is to sandwich some negative feedback between two bits of positive feedback thereby softening the blow. Guess what? We all know when it's being done to us and it tends to get used when you have only wafer-thin crispbreads of positive feedback to act as bookends for a massive wedge of negative filling. "Thank you for turning up to work every day - just about everything you do in your job is rubbish - but I really like your earrings." An exaggeration but you get the idea. Better to say what needs to be said, check how the person feels about it and what their view is and then look ahead.
Finally, there is an element of getting your own house in order when it comes to negative feedback. You may be skilled at giving it, but how elegant are you at receiving it? Before you unleash your negative feedback on unsuspecting staff and colleagues, do a quick check that you too can receive feedback with grace.
Ken Blanchard refers to feedback as “the breakfast of champions”, so yours needs to be digestible and if not palatable, at least useful and constructive to the person you give it to. That way, they may even return for seconds.
At a recent away day, a team were trying to get a date in the diary for a meeting. Everyone kept saying “I can’t do that date, I’m working.” We were going around in circles until the team’s leader said “We need to rethink our attitude to meetings – when we have a meeting, that IS work!”
Wise words indeed. So how have meetings become unmoored from work and viewed as an interruption and an irritation? Reasons like having too many, being at meetings where you’re not adding value and meetings that are all talk and no action spring to mind. If meetings no longer feel an important part of work, we need to look at why that might be – and what better time to do an early spring clean of your meetings schedule than now?
Here are 4 dark corners to delve into as part of your 2023 meetings overhaul.
One of the not so good things to come from the recent past is the impact virtual working has had on the way we communicate with each other. The pandemic paved the way for a meetings epidemic and most people’s meeting load has gone up. Despite the many gains of a more flexible approach to work, it’s harder to be spontaneous and informal and suddenly everything is a transaction aka a meeting. Let’s start to pare them down a bit. Is everything best served by a meeting? Could it be call, an email exchange or an agreement to catch up next time you’re both/all in the same location. Even if you agree to cut out one regular meeting, or find another way to get the agenda covered, it will make a difference.
It’s simple, there should be one. If meetings are work, they need to achieve something. Next time you get together, make item 1 on the list a chance to agree or renew the purpose. What are you getting together for and what will happen as a result? Actions don’t need to overwhelm everyone but there should be some. Connection and relationship development is a purpose for meeting but there probably needs a secondary reason too, for the event being in people’s diary. Renewing your meeting purpose is surprisingly energising and focusses people’s minds on why they are there and why there’s nowhere else they’d rather be. That might be pushing it a bit but you get the idea. And if no one can come up with or agree on a purpose, refer to point 1. above.
This is all about getting the right people around the table. Apparently, Jeff Bezos has a rule no meeting should be so large that two pizzas can’t feed the whole group. Clearly that depends on people’s appetites but it is often a case of the larger the meeting, the less that gets done. Everyone at your meetings should be a full participant, able to contribute and take away actions. Whilst you may get the odd guest, regular observers rarely add value. You want the meeting to be viewed as a positive part of everyone’s working day, not just useful to the person who leads it. Consider your attendee list and whether it needs revising. You may find you add rather than subtract which can bring a new energy to the proceedings. Just make sure they don’t eat more than their share of the pizza.
Were you brought up to keep your elbows off the table, chew with your mouth closed and tip your soup bowl away from you? We’re a bit more informal these days but manners still matter and we’ve forgotten some of ours at meetings. A simple rule to apply is, if you wouldn’t do it in the room, don’t do it on the screen. Agreeing some ground rules for meetings sounds a bit stern yet shows respect for everyone’s time and works well if they are agreed and decided by the group not an individual. One of our clients uses a set of meeting roles – parts that people take on to ensure the meeting runs well. As well as the meeting leader, there is a timekeeper, a scribe and a gatekeeper (makes sure everyone has their say and equal chance to input). And the roles rotate so no one gets stuck in a rut. They also review the effectiveness of the meeting with a final “how did we do?” agenda item. It’s brief but effective and it works for them. It might work for you too.
This is less about resolutions (usually fail) or revolutions (a bit full on for January) and more about making a few small changes. Maybe we should stop calling them meetings and start calling them workings.
On 4th November we were 25 years old. How did that happen?? In some ways, it seems like a few months ago that we started our consultancy but when we think about it, a lot has happened in our little world of Learning and Development (admittedly not as much as has happened in the wider world even in the last year!)
To mark our 25 years as a leadership and team development consultancy, we gave our thoughts last month, on some of the L&D trends we’ve seen since 1997 and the impact they had. In part 2 of this article, we’ll attempt a bit of crystal ball gazing, looking forward to what the next quarter century may bring to the workplace and the impact it could have on learning and development.
Here are 3 emerging trends, that we think are ones to watch.
Falling off the cliff
We live in interesting times. The concept of the “Talent Cliff” – a phenomenon where organisations lose employees at a rapid rate is not a new one but it is taking on a new meaning in 2022. The largest workforce in recent history is due to retire before the decade is out. Clearly, we didn’t get that memo. Lots of others did though and a workplace already struggling with gaps as people re-evaluate and make changes post-pandemic, is going to get gappier. The solution, we think, puts learning and development at its heart. Employers need to think about opportunities to keep people for longer and attract people to join and stay. Of course, decent pay and benefits play their part. Writer and speaker Dan Pink encourages us to: “Pay people properly and treat them with respect and you get the issue off the table, leaving them free to concentrate on what matters”. The key message here is to provide chances to grow, develop and stay interested. If you lead a team, now is a great time to think about what you can do to minimise the impact of a potential landslide.
Flat is the new shape
Hierarchies have been around forever. They help us know our place in the line, shine clarity on roles and responsibilities and give us something to aspire to. They appeal to those motivated to climb the ladder and advance to the dizzy heights of senior leadership. We don’t predict leadership lines disappearing but we do think the world is going to get flatter. Organisations now are all about collaboration, consultation and breaking down the dreaded siloes. That is out of step with complicated hierarchies. Matrix systems where we all have a range of responsibilities, dotted lines and internal clients are becoming the norm. We all want autonomy – to have a say in the what/when/where/how of our day. To achieve this, we need freedom to act and make decisions for ourselves whilst feeling like what we do connects to something bigger. In decades to come we believe structures will be much flatter and freer with good process in place to ensure everyone is clear without having to check in with a manager all the time. Let’s get well prepared for it now by ensuring we feel comfortable to delegate and share responsibility with great comms in place to avoid confusion. Complex hierarchies are on the out so don’t make a mountain when a molehill will do.
Gen Z calling the shots
Disclaimer: In this section we will make a few generalisations. We find all that is written on the Generations utterly fascinating. It informs the way we work and live, how we sell to customers, gain trust with clients and has a lot to teach us about how we lead future teams and individuals. As proud Generation Xers, we know how to work hard and play hard. We embraced technology, put in long hours, socialised at work and juggled (not to mention struggled) our way up the career ladder. We hid our tattoos and our piercings. Okay, some of us did. Behind us came Generation Y (also referred to as Millennials) and some new expectations. If you fall in to that generation or you manage someone who does, you will know different things are valued. For Gen Y it is about purpose not profit, work life balance rather than bank balance and output not hours. They want to be paid properly by an employer who enables and provides opportunities for growth.
That may describe the now, but this is a blog about the future. What of the generation entering work at the moment? Generation Z. These are our future shapers and leaders so what do they want? They’re digital natives, that’s a given – and it means they expect the right tools for the job; they want to work with cutting-edge technology so consider where you make your investments. Gen Zs are in to ethics and sustainability. They choose where they work, not just based on the job and conditions. They want to know what you are doing to give back and what your policies are on how you work responsibly. Interestingly, they value both flexibility and face to face interaction. Flexibility is an expectation so ignore it at your peril, but they also want connection; to be more than suppliers of work, they want to be colleagues. Consider how you can create an environment where Gen Zs can thrive, develop and become our next generation of leaders in this ever-changing world. And what of the group coming up behind them, named Generation Alpha? Given that as of now, the oldest they can be is 12 we’ll save our views on them for a future discussion.
Don’t be concerned if you consider your characteristics, wants and needs don’t fit with the generation your birthday assigned you (as per our disclaimer, we made some generalisations). The point is, we need to continue to listen to what team members want from work and from their employer, if we are to keep and nurture talent.
So, there you have it and thank you for gazing in to the future with us. What did you think of our predications and do they match yours? In the end none of us really knows what the next 25 years will bring. How could we (unless we are Bill Gates apparently) have ever predicted what happened in just the last few years?! What we are sure of is that things change and we will need to evolve to survive and thrive in the future. And we hope to be around for many more great conversations with you where we put the world to rights and with any luck, make it a better place.
On 4th November we will be 25 years old. How did that happen?? In some ways, it seems like a few months ago that we started our consultancy but when we think about it, a lot has happened in our little world of Learning and Development (admittedly not as much as has happened in the wider world even in the last year!)
To mark our 25 years as a leadership and team development consultancy, here are our thoughts on some of the L&D trends we’ve seen since 1997 and what impact they’ve had. In part 2 of this article next month, we’ll do a bit of crystal ball gazing, looking forward to what the next quarter century may bring in training and learning.
We’ve seen quite a few comings and goings in the last 25 years. Here are 4 trends that came but didn’t go.
Coaching first began as a profession in the 1970s (and no, we weren’t old enough to do it then) although it was referenced way back in the 1800s in university settings. It really started to gain traction in the late 80s/early 90s and many said it was a fad that wouldn’t last. Fast-forward 30+ years and it’s clear that coaching is here to stay. Organisations steeped in the “sheep-dip” mass group training approach baulked at spending money on one individual’s development – until it became clear this sort of targeted learning led to better, faster and more impactful results. Coaching can provide a unique forum for a person to learn, think things through and solve problems. John Whitmore, a leading figure in the field describes it as “unlocking people’s potential to maximise performance”. Whether you are a coach helping to unlock that potential or you’ve been coached and had a few lightbulb moments, you’ll be aware of its impact. Possibly the greatest value that coaching brings is quite simply time to think and reflect, with someone who asks powerful questions and then gets out of your way. In “Time to Think”, Nancy Kline says “A statement requires you to obey, a question requires you to think.” Long live coaching!
First of all, let’s knock the name on the head. Soft skills? They are anything but. But 25 years ago, that was what we called any non-technical training or learning relating to people skills. Back then it was seen as a luxury, an add-on. Now it is the difference that makes the difference. Whether you consider yourself a people person or someone who prefers minimal contact with other humans, certain skills are always on trend. In 1999 we invested in a relationship with a company called Insights Learning and Development and started to use their behavioural tools. 23 years on our relationship is as strong as ever and their tools have helped us help others to gain self-awareness, awareness of others and a route to better relationships with colleagues. The ability to listen actively, get your point across, engage with others, converse, share and adapt to deal with a range of different people – these things aren’t soft, they’re essential to our survival. So invest as much in them as your technical skills and you won’t go far wrong.
We set up as a training company. We ran courses and workshops. Then clients started to seek us out to steer their teams through a complex meeting, suggest ways to discuss and explore a contentious issue or hold the reins at a series of away days. Actually, there weren’t that many away days back in 1997 and we certainly hadn’t heard of “off-sites” – but we have now! The idea that the leader doesn’t have to lead everything and in fact shouldn’t chair everything is one of the reasons why using facilitators has become popular. At first some leaders were a little reluctant. Would it look like they were abdicating their role? Giving up control? But good facilitation isn’t leading and it definitely isn’t controlling. It requires an unbiased approach, sensitivity and diplomacy, a sharp sense of timing and more than a little creativity. If done right, it frees those in charge to be contributors and to fully involve themselves without having to run the room. It also gives teams exposure to innovative ways to explore, discuss and take action. The role of facilitator kept us on our toes then and still does now. It is said that a good facilitator doesn’t just guide the discussion, they also encourage the group to have the conversations that need to be had to get to a better place. PS – we still run courses. Facilitation is an “and” not an “or”.
Back in the early 90s, we had a colleague who worked in IT for a company who conducted all their training in Los Angeles. Based in the UK he would regularly jet over for weeks of courses. It was the norm then. Nowadays less so, to protect our budgets and our planet. But even 25 years ago, everything we offered as a consultancy, was delivered in a room. It’s hard to imagine now, but back then, if you didn’t get there you missed out. The word “hybrid” was only used to describe different species or varieties of plant or animal. Then saw the arrival of online learning. It was a bit clunky and dry at first but as new tools came on the market, it became a real alternative to in-room learning events. Now it is part and parcel of the way we all work and in the periods of lockdown during the Pandemic, it came in to its own. Now that we’ve been let out again, we can be more discerning. There’s nothing quite like the warm body experience for some learning. We know what works better with us physically together – including relationship-based learning and team coaching and what can work well with us apart – like general skills and knowledge updates. It’s a great addition to the world of learning and you save a fortune on work shoes – win/win.
Next month we’ll suggest some future trends for learning and development. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy (and giggle at) a picture of us in the 1990s which proves that it’s not just L&D that evolves…
Autumn is a busy old season. You’ll need all your resources to perform at the highest level over the coming months. Are you ready for everything the job throws at you or would a bit of help come in handy? Help comes in many forms: time with the boss, formal learning, coaching and nothing beats the experience you get by just doing the job, but you may feel you need something else. A helping hand from someone who’s been there.
A mentor is someone more experienced, often more senior, who has relevant wisdom to share and willingness to be generous with it. They may be in the same organisation as you and often they are not. Mentoring allows you to follow in the path of a wiser colleague who can pass on knowledge, experience and open doors to otherwise out-of-reach opportunities.
Some of our most rewarding work comes from being asked to mentor people. Our brand of wisdom is people intelligence and that is what we have to pass on. We help people to navigate their way through managing the maze of relationships, alliances, colleagues and challenges that are critical to their success at work.
When sourcing a mentor, it is important to know what you’re looking for. Here is a checklist of some of things you should expect from a mentor. They should be
And dare we say - someone who is prepared to give you a bit of tough love when you need to take action and stop procrastinating.
What could a mentor do for you? Good mentors should provide a combination of support and challenge to help you improve on areas where you struggle and develop your strengths to the max. And unlike coaches, mentors are allowed to give advice. Hooray. They do it from a position of knowledge and experience and they offer it understanding that it may or may not be accepted.
We find and our clients tell us that they achieve much more in a few short mentoring sessions than they ever could going through generic training. Mentoring is powerful, because it is targeted, it gets to the root of the problem and this means solutions follow swiftly. Mentors are usually sought out – people know who they want and can be of most value to them, so trust is established quickly. You can have a mentoring session in-person or remotely so it fits with today’s world.
And the great thing is, however old and wise you are, there is always someone older and wiser for you to seek out. Chances are someone is planning to seek you out for exactly the same reason. Keep your ears open.