Nancy Novak is the Chief Innovation Officer of Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, a Dallas-based company that designs and builds data centers. The opinions are the author’s own.
When I say the word “tutoring,” what image comes to mind? You probably immediately picture a gray-haired senior executive taking an employee 20 years his junior under his wing to impart decades of wisdom and secrets to success.
While this is certainly common, mentoring is not a one-way street where only one party gains value.
Nancy Novak
Permission granted by Compass Datacenters
The most powerful form of mentoring is two-way, where senior and junior colleagues come together to offer each other valuable advice through their different perspectives, complementary skills and collective knowledge. In this scenario, the young professional benefits from hard-earned insight and advice, while the seasoned professional benefits from new perspectives that help strengthen problem solving, strategy, communication and leadership.
The construction industry is an excellent example of a field where two-way mentoring can have a powerful impact on both junior and senior team members. There is a long history of formal and informal learning in the construction industry, where knowledge is passed down to junior workers from experienced professionals. This form of tutoring is important, however two-way mentoring is better.
In fact, I would argue that the future of our industry depends on the kind of communication and collaboration that is fostered by two-way mentoring. It’s not just a nice to have. It is imperative at a time when our industry is changing dramatically.
These changes are being driven by the relentless pace of technological change, labor shortages that worsen every year, sustainability mandates that drive the need for innovation/
Implementation of new generation technologies
When most people think of what senior professionals can learn from junior employees, the first things that come to mind might be tutorials on how to use tablets and social media.
These are not the technologies I have in mind when I talk about the enormous importance of two-way mentoring. I’m thinking of the long list of transformative technologies that are changing almost every aspect of how construction is done: prefabrication techniques, virtual and augmented reality tools, and AI-powered applications.
Many of these next-generation construction technologies will be more intuitive to younger professionals who grew up with much more technology than older workers in the construction industry. These younger professionals will also be the primary users of these technologies in the workplace and prefab factories.
Your feedback and guidance on how best to use these technologies will be invaluable to the senior decision makers responsible for moving the needle forward in your organization.
A common thread among so many of these technological advances is the importance of collaboration, which demands open, honest and clear lines of communication between senior and junior staff. The rapid acceleration in the use of prefabrication is a great example of where this collaboration is critical.
Prefabrication environments maximize efficiency and quality through a set of lean manufacturing processes for components that will be delivered and assembled on-site. Mentoring can play a powerful role in fostering the kind of effective communication and collaborative problem solving that drives efficiency gains by combining seasoned industry wisdom with modern knowledge for the good of the project .
Management of a changing workforce
Two-way mentoring is also critical to our industry because of the unprecedented workforce challenges we face. It’s no secret that the construction industry is struggling with a growing labor shortage.
Construction companies have traditionally drawn the majority of their employees from a blue-collar demographic, but this segment of the population has steadily declined over the past few decades.
Today’s young adults are much more likely to pursue a college education rather than looking at skilled trades and construction careers. This has been compounded by the perception problem that our industry has as a work environment that is not welcoming to people outside of its traditional male, blue-collar demographic.
The solution to this demographic challenge is to hire a more diverse workforce. Although the industry has come a long way diversity in recent decadeswomen still make up only 11 percent of the industry’s workforce, and 88 percent of workers are white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There are green shoots, though. Between the years 2016 and 2021, there was 32% increase in the number of women in the industry, according to software company Bluebeam. And every week I see examples of hiring initiatives that lead to greater diversity in our industry.
Where does two-way mentoring come into play for these work challenges?
Hiring will bring more and more diversity to our industry, including women and minorities who have tremendous skill sets that are perfect for the changing nature of construction work. For senior managers, this changing workforce will require new leadership and communication styles that may be very different from those of the past. These young professionals will be eager to learn from their more experienced colleagues, but the learning has to go both ways.
Construction leaders who commit to refining their management style to fit their changing workforce are the ones who excel. Two-way mentoring is critical to reducing the learning curve for leaders who want to understand their teams and set them up for success.
A win/win/win
Two-way mentoring not only allows new ideas to be shared across historical organizational barriers, but the practice itself within an organization creates a culture of inclusion.
When leaders make it clear that they are interested in receiving feedback on how to solve challenges, improve efficiency and speed up processes, employees feel valued. This mentoring model also has the added benefit of helping to retain retirement-age workers, revitalizing them and giving them a sense of purpose.
Removing the old top-down mentality of mentoring and adopting a two-way transformational model is one way companies can foster this kind of collaborative environment. The future of our industry depends on it.
