Hybrid mentorship: Valuing insights from every generation

MCS Influencer Randy Chaffee says that by working together, mentors and their protégés can come up with the best solutions.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Randy Chaffee of Source One Marketing. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the recording.

Jenny Yu: Hi everyone, it's Jenny Yu here with MetalCoffeeShop® today, and I'm here for an Influencer response for the month of April with Randy Chaffee of Source One Marketing. How are you?

Randy Chaffee: Hey Jenny, I'm good, how are you?

Jenny Yu: I'm doing great. Yeah, just a lovely, peaceful April so far.

Randy Chaffee: Yeah, good. Well, it's peaceful up here in New Hampshire where it's cold. I'm up here, as you can see, I'm in my car at a customer event. So came on, turned the heater on, ready to go.

Jenny Yu: I love it. Well, we're wondering if you could share your thoughts on this month's topic on recruitment, retention and quality. And specifically, we're hoping you could share your thoughts on building loyalty through mentorship and apprenticeship programs.

Randy Chaffee: Yeah, I love to. Yeah. And I think I love that subject, Jenny, because, you know, we spend so much time in any part of the industry, whether we're suppliers, or whether we're trying to get new people. And to continually turn over people is incredibly costly, not only just in dollars and cents for the whole recruiting and training process, but it's costly for team morale. Everybody wants to become part of a family, right? A team. When you have constant turnover, it just continually gets in the ways of those relationships. So, I think it's important to obtain good people, but then how do we keep them?

I think a lot of that is, at the early start: do we offer apprenticeship programs to help people find out, is this even for me? Because not always is everything a good fit. Maybe you just don't belong in the metal world, right? Maybe it just doesn't fit you. Well, then I think apprentice programs will help you get a feel for is this where I want to be as a young person, or it doesn't have to be so much age, but if you've never been in the metal, you're looking for a new career, as opposed to just, it's a job and we'll hire you cause we need people. Let's make sure it's a fit first, right? For both sides and make sure it's right. So I think that's where the apprenticeship comes in.

And I love the mentorship, Jenny, because, and I think my, what I would like to say about that is, is, is a term that I've kind of coined recently and like to use, which is a "hybrid mentorship." See, we think of mentorship as older people, whether it's age in general or length of time in an industry, teaching the younger. And that makes perfect sense. It has to happen. It needs to happen. But I think we should be more open to that and make that more available.

But I also think that we need to look at the reverse of that, which is taking the younger people and let them mentor the folks that are a little bit older, either again, in age or length of time, because the views of a 20 or 30 year old is not the same. They don't have any of the same life history to draw upon as somebody in their 50s, 60s and 70s. So I think while in the 50s, 60s and 70s, we've got experience, we've got all that miles under our belt, right? But we don't understand what you all are thinking if you're 25 years old. It's been a long time since we've been there, and the world's changed.

So I think if we can have situations where people mentor each other, and it's not just this old guy or old gal pointing fingers and palm at the desk and telling the young people, this is how I done it. This is how you need to do it. Let's ask questions and let's listen and say, well, this is what's worked for me, right, Jenny? But what do you see from your age group? What could work for me? What could I do differently?

Maybe I'm not communicating with you well at all, because I had a great example. I listened to a talk once two or three years ago, and he talked about the age differences, right? Many of us are in age that we were alive and knew exactly who we were with, what we were doing when 9/11 happened. That was not just something we read about or saw some video on TV someday. We listened to what happened. We saw it happen live, so to speak, right? It's a different experience than somebody that just was one year old or not even born yet or has read about it and seen some video. And I realized how important that is because I'm older, but I didn't live through World War II. I'm not that old. So I read the history books. I watched the video. I know what an incredibly horrible thing that whole thing was. But then I can go, okay, well, what's on TV? I didn't live it. Right. And so it's not the same to me as somebody that's 20, 30 years old. If they're still around that actually was a 20 year old when that happened.

So I think we have to draw upon what people's life experience is. If you're 20s and 30s, you don't have the same life experience I have. And I need to understand that. And I can't talk to you the same way I might talk to somebody my age, because somebody in that age group, you either don't understand, you don't have the same experience or it's almost like, shut up, old guy. I don't want to hear what you're saying because that makes no sense to me at all. Right?

So I think we can learn from each other. And I think if we build a mentorship program, Jenny, that helps in a perfect scenario, in my opinion, a team effort. You're not just me mentoring you as an old guy mentoring a younger person. I would like to be mentored back as well. I want to learn how to operate in your world because I can't expect in maybe today's world, I guess I'm a little more new age than some maybe. I don't feel I can demand as somebody a little bit older in the industry. You just got to come on my way and do it my way because I've been doing it forever, because you know what? Maybe my way isn't right. Or maybe there's adjustments we can make. Maybe together, as a younger and an older person working together, we can come up with the best alternative.

That's what I would say is, apprenticeship's important to make sure once you have the apprenticeship program, you're not done mentoring all day, every day. And I don't mean you don't set up to have a mentoring session every day, but I think it's a learning experience all day, every day for the rest of your career.

Jenny Yu: Definitely. I love that. We can learn from anyone, whether they're older or younger than us. And it really shows how we need to value everyone on the team, including the vets, including the new folks as well. So, thank you. 

Randy Chaffee: Anytime. Always a pleasure, Jenny, thank you.

Jenny Yu: Same, thank you.