If a mentor you are meant to be, don’t be the shy and retiring type

Keep swimming like a shark because there’s always someone younger, prettier and more talented than you right behind you, writes Terry Prone

WHEN a client asked me last week if I was following the Nóirín O’Sullivan retirement, the answer had to be yes.

Not much of a choice. It was difficult, last week, to get away from either Ms O’Sullivan or George Hook, particularly after Newstalk told the latter to take his hat and his leave in a suspended kind of way.

No suspension happened in Ms O’Sullivan’s case. She just divested herself of her lanyard and off she went back to being a civilian. Someone should tell her that it’s fun out here in

Civilian Land, but that the uniform isn’t as good.

My client, as it turned out, felt she had something in common with the former Garda commissioner, in that she believed she was being subtly invited to consider early retirement. I didn’t interrupt her flow to tell her my impression was that subtlety wasn’t much in evidence in the various invitations to depart made to the police chief over the past year or so.

The client is past her mid-50s, but is not aggressively pushing 60 yet, and believes there’s at least one swing left for her on the career roundabout. Or did, until her boss did her annual review with her.

A short digression, here. I love annual reviews, because I get a lot of business out of them.

Frequently, it’s because the executive being reviewed is told, “you seriously need to address such-and-such a behaviour,” or “your communication skills are not at the right level for us to consider promoting you,” and so they seek help.

Sometimes, they seek help blind with rage and despair, because they figure the training their company is prepared to provide is offered merely to cover the corporate behind and is

actually the precursor to a firing within a few months.

In this case, the executive got pretty much rave notices, with the numbers falling just under the possible totals, she suspected, only to stop her looking like she should rule the world, or at least her own company.

Towards the end of the encounter with her boss, she was just this side of smug when he leaned back in the chair, put his hands behind his head (always a bad sign, trust me on this) and asked her if she didn’t think it was time to “wind down” and “maybe do some mentoring”.

This flummoxed her to such an extent that she said something interrogatory like “sorry?” which he took as an invitation to expand on the thesis.

The thing was, he said, coming slowly off the backward chair slant, bringing down his hands and examining them with approving interest, the thing was that the company had so many young people these days, you know?

Sometimes it made even him feel old, he chuckled softly, in a way that invited a brisk sharing by her of the self-deprecatory comic conceit. Sort of a tandem chuckle, if she was willing to throw her leg over the two-seater bike.

Since the woman’s legs were pressed together at knee and ankle by this point with enough force to cause deep-vein thrombosis right there, he laughed alone.

So many young people, he went on, with so few of the real skills. He wasn’t saying they weren’t brilliant, but they did have gaps, you know? No, she didn’t know, her now-frozen face conveyed.

Her boss pointed out that one British university is giving consideration to switching from handwriting to laptops for exams, because pen skills are so much on the wane.

Students are coming up to their degree exams having literally never written anything down, other than the odd notice (“Someone buy fusilli, pls”) in their shared home until the exam that requires them to do handwriting for two or three hours at a stretch.

My client nodded, unsure if he wanted her to teach some of the genius coders upstairs in their HQ good cursive handwriting, using fountain pens. “You know yourself,” the boss said by way of summary.

It’s quite a difficult form of words to oppose, that one, because of the casual certainty of attributed acquiescence it carries.

She took refuge in silence.

“Anyway, listen,” he said, beginning to lose interest. “It might be a good time to think through all of your options.”

She nodded in disagreement and left. Now, of course there’s a difference between that last sentence and the more dire version that goes: “It’s now time to consider your options.”

The second one was best expanded upon in the 17th century by Oliver Cromwell, when he told the Rump Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

Having it suggested that you might like giving up the pain of nine to fiving by early retirement followed by a bit of mentoring is a much milder proposal as far as the proposer sees it. From the point of view of the executive on the receiving end, it is a very different pot of poissons.

More to the point, it is a total misunderstanding of mentors and mentoring.

Many mentors, indeed probably the majority of mentors, are retired. Retirement gives them the time and perspective to be helpful to younger executives. But the prospect of mentoring is not a reason for retiring.

Think of it this way: The dead are often an inspiration to the living. But seeking inspiration from them is not a justification for killing someone off, any more than seeking mentors is a

justification for getting rid of an older member of a workforce.

The formal, corporate approach to mentoring has its merits, but I doubt those merits match those offered by the informal approach.

From the beginning of my career, I was voluntarily mentored. At 13, a journalist named Tony Butler noticed a competition entry submitted by me and decided I could be useful to his page if he taught me some of the rules. Which he did. Much the same happened to me in theatre, although one older actor’s sole piece of advice is the only one I remember: “Keep swimming like a shark because there’s always someone younger, prettier, and more talented than you right behind you.”

Volunteer mentors matter, not because they are volunteers, but because they notice potential in individuals and set out to ensure that potential flowers.

They don’t have to be exceptionally successful themselves, but if someone is seen at the top as surplus to requirements, proposing a package to them entailing early retirement plus a few mentoring sessions with a 20-something doesn’t seem well thought out.

The mentored is hardly going to get major current insights about how to succeed in an organisation from which the mentor has recently been extruded. The mentor would need to be dumb as a tree to see this as a great end-of-career possibility.