The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

Redefining Aging Through Mentorship and Generativity with Dr. Deborah Heiser

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Discover how the drive to give back can redefine the aging experience with our insightful guest, Dr. Deborah Heiser. Dr. Heiser, a trailblazer in the study of aging, shares her unique journey from focusing on aging challenges to exploring mentorship and the enriching aspects of generativity. After a pivotal moment at a conference, she shifted her perspective to highlight the human desire for meaningful contributions through mentorship, philanthropy, or volunteering. Join us as we unpack the differences between mentors, coaches, and colleagues, and why genuine mentor-mentee connections are essential for both personal satisfaction and professional success.

This episode is a treasure trove of strategies for anyone eager to engage in effective mentorships that foster growth and collaboration in dynamic environments.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
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Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development. Today, my special guest is Deborah Heiser. Dr. Deborah Heiser, Welcome to the show.

Deborah Heiser:

Thank you for having me on. I'm really excited to be here.

Jay Johnson:

I am too, Deborah, and we're going to dig into mentorship, but before we do that, I'd love for the audience to have a chance to get to know you just a little bit.

Deborah Heiser:

So tell us your story. How did you get into mentorship, talent development, where do you begin? Well, it was a long journey. To be quite honest with you, it started with me working in the field of aging, and most people say how could that have led to mentoring? But I was studying and researching everything no one ever wants to have, which is like depression, alzheimer's, frailty, et cetera. And I went to a conference and someone said to me what do we have to look forward to as we age? And I didn't have an answer for him. You know I was like less depression.

Jay Johnson:

That's a tough question yeah.

Deborah Heiser:

And it was an aha moment for me. So I had to take a look at everything I was researching and it made me think what do I have to look forward to, you know, beyond research? So when I went back to the books, I found all of the developmental research that existed, and I'm an applied developmental psychologist. So this was, you know, going back to my roots and taking it beyond childhood, and what I was able to find is that there's a lot of rich information out there, studies that have been more than 75 years old, but people weren't paying attention to it.

Deborah Heiser:

So in midlife, we're built to want to give back, and I found that out and started really researching it, and one of the ways we give back is mentoring. So we have three ways we can give back mentoring, volunteering or philanthropy. And not everyone can really get meaning out of the dollar that we may give away here and there and can't put a name on a building that we may give away here and there and can't put a name on a building. When we volunteer, it's someone else's idea. We still usually engage in it anyway, but mentoring is a piece of us that we take and we give to somebody else. So that's where I ended up landing on this and then ran with it, because it's just unbelievable to be able to look at you know, the nameless, faceless person who's the mentor that we've all heard go get a mentor, but we don't know who that is and to look at that person.

Jay Johnson:

Oh, I can't wait to dig into this. So and I have so many questions for you I want to share a couple of quick things, and I I love that. I love the work that you're doing. Um, so I have my father's in the late stages of Alzheimer's and dementia. Um, my sister's a caretaker and I'm a part-time caretaker. Every now and then I'll have them here at my place for a couple of nights. But, uh, I also do a lot of work in consulting. I'll give a quick shout out to the area, um, the area agencies on aging here in Michigan. So I do a lot of work in consulting. I'll give a quick shout out to the area the area agencies on aging here in Michigan. So I do a lot of work with them and support them as best as I possibly can. Obviously, it's something near and dear to my heart. So, first, I just want to say thank you, because the work that you're doing is obviously very, very meaningful and impactful to not only your clients, but to also some of us that are in that space and experiencing some of that as well. So awesome and kudos to you.

Jay Johnson:

Second, okay, mentorship, because this always, always, I think and I'm going to say it get screwed up. I have seen so many organizations launch mentorship programs that are absolute, abject failures that by the time that the first year rolls around, they just cut it, and part of it is is that the mentors aren't ready, part of it that the mentees aren't knowing what to expect or anything else. Sometimes they walk into it and it's like, okay, is this a psychologist that's going to mentor me into my position or my life? Is this a coach? Is this a guru that's sitting on the mountaintop? So, debra, can you help us understand what is it? That sort of like classifies a mentor versus a coach, versus a colleague, or something of that nature. Can you help us understand that?

Deborah Heiser:

Yeah, there's so much to unpack and I'm so excited to be able to talk about this, because when we think of mentorship and we think of work, it's a transactional relationship and usually the mentors left out of it it's just some like if you say what's the who's, the mentor you're going for, people are like I don't know somebody a couple of levels above me or they'll match you, but how many times, if you're on a dating app, do you swipe, do you pick the first one and say I'm going with them?

Jay Johnson:

No.

Deborah Heiser:

But we expect that to be the case with a mentor, and this mentor is supposed to be all-knowing. It's like Yoda, you know, that's out there and ready to just sit there and devote everything to that person in a way that you know feels like a therapist and feels like a coach and all of the things that we would ever want in some fictitious person like Yoda way. When I was doing the research, I found that people were looking at mentoring as transactional and mentoring isn't Really. It has about five things involved in it and this is where, if we break it down, we can find out where it doesn't work in the workplace.

Deborah Heiser:

So, first off, before we start anything, if you're getting paid to mentor, you're not a mentor. So if you are at work and it is required of you, you are not a mentor. You are an employee, maybe you're an advisor, you could be a coach, you could be, but you're not a mentor. And this makes a lot of people mad because they say, well, I'm mentoring too, and I say, are you getting paid? And they say yeah, and I say, then you're not a mentor.

Jay Johnson:

And so let me- You're managing, you're not mentoring. Yes, you're doing your job, right, yeah, right.

Deborah Heiser:

It's like saying if you're a parent, do you love your child? Well, yes, you're supposed to. You know, like you don't get extra for that.

Jay Johnson:

So that makes a lot of sense too, in terms of the way that you've structured giving back. Right, I'm not giving back because it is transactional. It's not me doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I have some kind of organizational, corporate or financial value in lieu of my time and energy that I'm dedicating to somebody else. So that makes total sense, and I could see how some people would push back. Well, I am mentoring. I have three direct reports that I'm mentoring, okay. Well, let's rephrase that. So I'm sorry, continue on. I thought that was super interesting.

Deborah Heiser:

So, if we start with it, there's a term called generativity and this is an emotional developmental stage we hit in midlife. Most of us think of aging as a steep incline of our physical abilities and then a slow, steady decline. That's why no one likes to think and talk about aging, because we think of midlife and beyond as a decline. But what most people don't know is that our emotional trajectory only goes up. It never, ever goes down. You can expect to be happier when you're older and just everything emotionally gets better. It never declines. When we're starting to decline physically, our emotion hits a point where we say, wow, I've accumulated all of this knowledge and expertise and wisdom. I want to give it back. So to the world, I want a piece of me to live on. It's more than a legacy. It's that we're saying, hey, I want to see that I mattered, that my life has meaning, that I'm not just here taking up space. Why did I check all those boxes off? So when we're in the workplace or at home, this is where we feel a need. In midlife, by the time you're 50, this is when most people reach it, and I'll give you an example of what this looks like when a person doesn't.

Deborah Heiser:

So Ebenezer Scrooge is the guy who had everything. He was a self-made guy. He lived in a mansion, servants took care of all of his needs and he was miserable. He didn't reach that generative stage. You can see when he did, because when he took on Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit's family, that's when he experienced joy. He was giving back. That's generativity. It was giving back, that's generativity. So we're all doing this, we just don't think about it. The other thing is that there's something called intrinsic motivation. Now, we all are intrinsically motivated to do things. If you love reading, no one has to say, hey, I'll give you five bucks if you read a book, if you play a sport, if you do whatever it is that you enjoy, you don't need pay for it.

Jay Johnson:

And I was going to say interesting. Daniel Pink's work actually shows transactional value in something that we have intrinsic drive for, decreases, the intrinsic drive to do it, which is super fascinating as well.

Deborah Heiser:

Absolutely yeah, he hit the nail on the head with that. The example I always give is how often you know I'll ask my class when I teach how many of you would go volunteer at a soup kitchen? And they all raise their hand. And then I say, okay, how many of you would take that same time and volunteer at Starbucks? And they all say I would never do that.

Deborah Heiser:

And that's just a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So you want to go, you feel great after you volunteer at a soup kitchen, but you'd feel like a schmuck at Starbucks giving away your time for free same people, the hungry and thirsty but the motivation is different. Now, this is the key part at work. One of the key parts, because when you're at work and you are, your motivation is your paycheck or your performance review or something else like that. It is an extrinsic motivator. You're like a sudden, you know you go down in your desire to do it. It's a burden, it's an extra box to check, as opposed to doing something that you love.

Deborah Heiser:

And another thing at work that's a big issue is trust. No one ever wants to let their boss or someone a couple levels above think they don't know everything. An example I always give with that is I was talking to federal judges in Iowa. I was talking to federal judges in Iowa and one of them, who was retiring, said yeah, you know there's a problem with judges because they have to be able to you know, communicate that they know everything. Who wants a judge that doesn't know what the case? You know? How do you? You know, you have to have trust in this. It would be like a doctor and they don't know what they're doing. You don't want to hear that.

Deborah Heiser:

So the what they did was they set it up so they could have a feeling of trust. So they did lunches where people could turn to the side and say, oh hey, jim or Mary, I know you had a case like this. Can you tell me about it? It took away all of that feeling of vulnerability that you often get in a workplace where you feel like someone's going to tell somebody that I stink at this or I don't know what I'm doing. As soon as you remove that, I usually say insert lateral mentoring there, where you're not looking to somebody a couple levels above, but you're looking to somebody to your right or to your left, and that is where you know if you can insert that into a workplace. Lunches, water cooler talks, Zoom meetings, retreats, conferences, whatever you're gonna, you know, end up having more mentoring.

Jay Johnson:

I picked up on something you said there too, which I found to be really interesting is right like if we're in the mentee position, we don't want to look like we don't know, just as much as if you're in the mentor position you don't want to look like you don't know. And there's this perception game. There's this. You know, I got to make sure that I'm not putting myself in future risk of somebody you know, this mentor of mine going back to the boss and being like this person's never going to get it. So there's almost like this disincentive for any kind of vulnerability or any kind of like openness in communication. So it it seems like that's almost like bi-directional. So not only am I not going to disclose something, but I'm also not going to acknowledge or admit that I don't know something.

Deborah Heiser:

You're the only one to ever pick up on that. That is, you are so right, and I often forget to mention that we feel like mentorship is reciprocal or in a way that is transactional right. So the mentor has to trust that the mentee is going to take their valuable knowledge and information and they're not going to just discard it. You know, if I give you a gift and I say, oh hey, jay, I have this gift for you and you're like I've got enough gifts, I'm good, I'll feel totally horrible. I have to trust that you're going to want to open that gift and that you'll think that something that I give you is of value to you. And so when we think of that and what the mentor is going to get from it, that's a big deal. So that's sort of what you're talking about. Trust has to go in both ways. I have to trust that I'm not just throwing my information out, you know, like a knowledge slut, I guess.

Jay Johnson:

Sorry, I love it.

Deborah Heiser:

Just throwing it around everywhere, to everyone. I want to feel like it's landing with someone who cares.

Jay Johnson:

That goes back to your concept of purpose, right Like? The knowledge that I'm sharing is valuable. I've earned this knowledge over the course of my midlife and at this point in time, if you're not taking that seriously, you're not taking my entire experience or my existence serious. So why am I having this conversation? I could totally see why.

Deborah Heiser:

that would be really disruptive for a mentor yeah, you'd feel like, oh, all those boxes I checked didn't ever matter. All that matters is that I'm, you know, a cog in this wheel at work. I'm just, you know, some tiny piece and that's it. And what a mentee does for a mentor is it makes their world feel huge. When I'm mentoring and someone takes my information, I feel like a thousand times bigger and bolder and whatever, because, wow, they like you know, they like my information, they think it's important, they want to use it. They want to use it. It's the same as when you, like I mentioned, you give a gift or you expose someone to something and their eyes turn wide open and they're so thrilled with it. It's an absolutely amazing feeling.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. So we had mentioned these different things of what kind of keeps us out of it being mentorship. If I was to ask you because I know that a lot of our HR people, a lot of our trainers, talent development folks have probably seen some level of mentorship within their organizations frame that let's not call it mentorship, or is there a way to do this sort of in a corporate or organizational setting that's meaningful and impactful for both mentor and mentee?

Deborah Heiser:

Yeah, I think as soon as a person is able to see the real you know, have more of a definition of what mentorship really is, then it's easy. So if you have generativity, intrinsic motivation, you have trust, a meaningful connection. People have to like each other. It's like swiping, you know. You have to like the person and there has to be a goal, otherwise you're just chit-chatting. If you have those five things, then you have real mentorship and those are easy to accomplish in the workplace. So if you are in the workplace and you're saying I want to, you know, make sure that I'm making mentorship available to people. You know there are some things that you can do that are really set up to be good.

Deborah Heiser:

Lateral mentoring that requires no money, that is just setting up lunchtime where people can meet and talk, where you can talk to somebody next to you, removes all of that vulnerability, the vulnerability issues that you have. If you have people who want to mentor, we have to remember that the mentorship is coming from the mentor who wants to give it away, not the mentee who's grabbing and saying I want. So as long as you can have people who want to mentor, who say and this has happened at IBM, irene Yacobus went to work on her third day. Someone said I want, I'm happy, to mentor anyone. She raised her hands, you know, said I'd like some, and they remained mentor mentee for a long time. So if you can have people who would like to mentor this feels good to them and they aren't getting a performance review for it, they're not having any extrinsic motivator put on it then have them make that announcement in a way that they'd like, in the way that they want to give back, so that a mentee can say that's my person. There we go.

Jay Johnson:

So more of a voluntary, sometimes lateral, or at least creating the safe space for those types of conversations to occur, so that way it's not necessarily pressured or pressurized. Now, in that lateral mentorship, have you experienced or seen right and this is something that like, especially in my, my management training program what I see often, one of my biggest questions is yesterday we were lateral, today I'm leading that person as their manager and that is a huge transitional shift. Do you ever see anything in sort of like that lateral mentorship opportunity where maybe there is a little guarding or potential guarding, because hey, we might both be going up for that promotion in a year or two years or three years, I don't know.

Deborah Heiser:

Yeah, then it's not a mentor.

Jay Johnson:

And.

Deborah Heiser:

I hear this in finance hedge fund people will say I'm not sharing anything with anybody. You know we eat what we kill. You know that kind of a thing.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, that may not apply to everyone. Super scarce, yeah. Scarcity mentality rather than abundance, sure.

Deborah Heiser:

I'm going to give you an example of two examples, real quick, of what lateral mentoring looks like, because most people think that it can't be put in places. So imagine it's 2003 and the Columbia Space Shuttle disintegrates to the horror of everyone who's watching. Now fast forward to 2005,. You're an astronaut in space, you're out there and you're like yippee, this is great, everything I've ever dreamed of. I've always wanted to be an astronaut. And then you get a call from NASA hey, there might be the same problem that the Columbia shuttle had. Well, you can't open the door and say I'm out of here, you have to figure it out. So in that case, charlie Camarda, who was the astronaut on the STS-114, said hey, I don't feel like calling my boss. They just told me there could be a problem, but they're not sure. So he didn't have that trust, right. So he called somebody that he knew that was a lateral mentor and said am I going to live or die? Do I call my family or do? Is there something we can do? And that person said let me take a look, let's work this out. They worked it out. They found out they needed to do a spacewalk. So Charlie presented that to his team. They called NASA. They said we're doing a spacewalk. They survived, they came home.

Deborah Heiser:

In the case of now, that's lateral mentoring. He did not have that trust. Now he could go at a different point in time and have trust in somebody above him, but not then when he was in space. So we should and could have a bazillion different mentors at any time. So you don't just look to your right and say, oh, there's only one person, there's Jim, that will be my mentor. You know we look around, we have to really. You know Charlie said he keeps a little black book of all the people that are most important to him, that he trusts in the world, and he took that into space. And I call that his potential lateral mentor book Because and we all have that, you know we all do.

Deborah Heiser:

All of our friends, all of our colleagues have different areas of expertise. Now, latanya Kilpatrick at Colgate-Palmolive she is a global SVP and so she has a ton of patents. They're looking at oral health in many different ways and so she was looking and she's high up, and a lot of people who are high up say I don't have anybody above me who can mentor me when I hit a wall. And so what she did was she was at a conference, regular old conference, and she was. She met somebody who worked in dog food, something in dog food, and when she hit her wall she said I wonder if that person who's studying dog food, you know, and how it works for dogs, would understand the microbiomes of humans. So she called her and the woman said yeah, here's where we are. They applied that to human beings and made a huge breakthrough in oral health for humans. So that's a lateral mentor. She trusted her. There was no conflict there. It was a completely different area.

Deborah Heiser:

So we can go pretty far out with our lateral mentors. They don't have to be where we work, they can be in another job altogether where somebody has no conflict there. So it's really being very creative in how we acknowledge that mentors are all around us.

Jay Johnson:

I'm going to dig back into that in just a few moments here, but I want to ask a question. So here's one of the things that I've experienced, both in an organization that I was. They had said hey, we want to launch this mentorship program and this is a membership organization. In theory, most of the people are lateral. Some people obviously had more experience and so on and so forth, so they recruited, they said, hey, anybody that's open to being a mentor, and a number of people threw their name into the hat. After that occurred, they said members, if you're looking for membership, we'll match you with a mentor.

Jay Johnson:

Now they did make a mistake and it was first come, first serve and you're assigned a mentor. It wasn't swipe right, swipe left. It was just like oh, you'd be a great fit for this person. You happen to be in the same time zone, or you'd be a great fit for this person, you both study behavioral science or whatever. It was right. So I can already see that that was a mistake and an error on the organizational part.

Jay Johnson:

When the actual mentoring happened and this was feedback that had come back after some surveys and some focus groups after it was done, some of the things that had occurred was the mentor wasn't sure what to share. They didn't know what was valuable. They didn't know what to tell them or how to advise them or anything else. The mentees felt like they were leading like it wasn't, like they were only able to ask the questions that they had knowledge and experience of, but they didn't know what they didn't know, which you know.

Jay Johnson:

You've already said the mentee getting information is different than the mentor providing information. How would you suggest, like when you have something like that where it is meeting a number of the different qualifications of maybe lateral, no conflict, that there is trust, because this organization really does have like a lot of trust for each other inside of its membership? How do you structure something like that to make sure that the mentor is prepared to deliver on the promise of mentorship and that the mentee is maybe prepared for receivership or being you know being in that relationship? What would be some of your best practices to make sure that that comes off without either side feeling like, well, this was a waste of my time?

Deborah Heiser:

Yeah, you know some of them can, and I think that people think that every mentoring interaction is going to be a success and it's just like making friends. Sometimes you're like that's not my person and we have to be okay with. That is number one. Number two is that people have to know their job. You know, if you went out and you made a friend with somebody and they were just like, oh yeah, bring me my coffee, or you know, hey, you give to me all the time and I'm just going to sit and receive, that's not a friend. You're going to quickly leave that friendship.

Deborah Heiser:

We have to think of mentorship in the same way. So the mentee needs to know their job. You know not, everybody knows. You don't know what you don't know. So it's a burden on a mentee to come in with questions because they're not going to know what they don't know. Yet hand could feel a lot of pressure if they are there to change the life of this person, and so you have to make sure that you take away those two burdens from them and then there can be a free flow conversation. So if the mentor is there saying here's the information I have that I feel confident I can bestow on you. I know the lay of the land of this big place. You want to learn the lay of the land. You're new. I'm your person, or I know how to navigate a certain department. That's great. Then you have something that you can give. I'm just making up two things.

Jay Johnson:

Sure.

Deborah Heiser:

My key job in that case would be to say I am going to be really excited to learn the lay of the land of this place and I will be asking questions like what happens in the culture of this company that is different from the one that I used to go to do. How do people greet each other? All of the various things that happen that can be so frightening for somebody who's new or something like that. But you have to give them the idea of what they're looking for, because if the mentee comes in and they say I expect that you are going to do all of these things for me and the mentor's not thinking that you're going to have a problem. So it's really just. Here are the rules and they're pretty, they're pretty broad, but really just like that. You have to have that give and take ready.

Jay Johnson:

But some level of structure to kind of keep people to say, hey, this is what we want, this is what we don't want, this is what is on the table, this is what's kind of off the table, still making it loose enough that natural human conversations can occur. But at least giving some idea of this is the pathway. Is that, would that be?

Deborah Heiser:

fair. You know a lot of people think well, what, what can they share and what can't they? If I give them personal information, what are they going to share and what are they not going to share? And I like to say cause you know I run the mentor project there's nothing off the table. You share something with your mentor and it can go anywhere. You know it can be recorded, it can whatever you know.

Deborah Heiser:

If you were on a one-to-one zoom, go into this without thinking that, because otherwise people fall into feeling like it's a therapy session and that they can, you know, divulge all kinds of things and that's a burden to a mentor in many cases. If you need to say, hey, I feel unsafe or I don't feel that's a burden to a mentor in many cases, if you need to say, hey, I feel unsafe or I don't feel, that's one thing, but it should not be on the mentor to feel like they are your therapist. And that is where, if you put those rules out in the same way look, this is not a confidential conversation like a therapy session would be the same as if you're meeting with a coach. A coach that's not. It shouldn't be confidential. It should be that you're there to do. You have a goal, job related Right.

Jay Johnson:

So let's say that I and let's do this bidirectionally, okay Say I'm a person that wants to find a mentor, somebody to share their wisdom, their knowledge and information with me, and we'll also look at the other side and say I'm somebody that has some wisdom, some knowledge and experience that I've amassed and I'm ready to generatively share this with the external world. So if I was in that space, in either of those spaces, what would your recommendation? Let's start with the mentee. I'm looking for a mentor that's going to help me, that's going to guide me. What would be a strategy for me? To connect, find the right person, find somebody that's interested in potentially being that for me?

Deborah Heiser:

So I can tell you how it works with the mentor project and how I would put it in a company and real quick, if can you.

Jay Johnson:

Can you contextualize the mentor project to share with the audience a little bit what that is, and then nail it Sure.

Deborah Heiser:

The mentor project is an organization that I founded, along with several other people in about five years ago, and we're a nonprofit and we've served students around the world for free by bringing the world's top 1% experts from astronauts to artists to mentor students for free around the world, to artists to mentor students for free around the world. We've given away just this year and we're not done with this year more than $2 million worth of mentoring hours. So when the mentees come to us-.

Jay Johnson:

It's incredible. That is incredible, by the way.

Deborah Heiser:

And this is all volunteering. There is only intrinsic motivation. And we started with 10 people, people and people said no one's ever going to want to donate their time for free. That's crazy. And I was like, oh all right, well, let's just try it out. And it turned out we went from 10 to 60 within six months, then to 80.

Deborah Heiser:

We have a wait list because people ask all the time if they can mentor. It's, you know, generativity is what we're built to do and it was kind of a really cool way to prove that it does work. But the mentees come to us and the mentors come to us first and they'll say, hey, here's what I'm good at and I like to do. We put that out there. We can put a bio up of what they do and a picture, and then a mentee will come and they'll fill out a form and they'll say, hey, I'm looking for X, you know. It could be that they say I'm looking to learn, if I, you know, can do research, that we would say, oh well, we have these researchers. Would you like to meet them? They love to mentor in that area and we can match them up. And then we'll we'll. Usually what we do is we say try somebody outside of your area too, because you might find something you like as well. So that's how we do that.

Deborah Heiser:

If you're in the workplace, it's amazing. You would not even be able to imagine how amazing it is to be able to have a person give, like, a talk or to say what they're good at and what they do, because there's going to be somebody in that audience who's going to say, wow, I want to learn from that person and they'll know what they want to learn from them. You know it's very hard unless you've heard somebody speak. That was an example of what Irene did. She went to a new place. She was at NASA, she went to IBM two different cultures.

Deborah Heiser:

Someone said, hey, I'd like to mentor and she saw this person was amazing. She said I want to have that person mentor me and. But she knew then what she wanted. The person had put it out there in a talk. So there's nothing better than being able to highlight your professionals who are working with what they're doing regularly, whether that's over Zoom, whether that's on a Slack channel, whether that's in some way. But if somebody is able to say here's what I do and you know what, I'm open to somebody coming to me with questions. They don't have to say I will now mentor people, but they have an open door and then somebody can say I'd like to. I'd like to walk through that open door and that would be what the mentee does. It's so organic feeling and everyone feels good when you do that.

Deborah Heiser:

It's you're tapping into somebody's generativity and you're tapping into somebody's like desire to accept that generativity.

Jay Johnson:

I love it, like I don't know why, but I had this visual like image of like speed, speed dating and mentoring, you know, in the office, like what are you good at?

Jay Johnson:

You know, what are you good at, oh, what are you interested in, and kind of having a little bit of fun with that.

Jay Johnson:

But I think it makes so much sense, right, like when we, when you're assigned and this is how I've seen it done in so many organizations when you're assigned a mentor oh, you know, this is Jay, he's been here for 20 years, he's great at his job let him mentor you. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's what you're looking for. So if it's hey, you know I'm Jay and I've done this and my background's in behavioral science and here's what I navigate is people in relationships no-transcript. It's just not done particularly well, and I think the programs that I've seen really struggle because they are missing at least one, if not five, of the different things that you've identified as essential. If our audience wanted to get in touch with you and learn more about mentoring, or if they wanted to read your book I'm going to give you a little nod there too how would they reach out to you? What would they be able to do to kind of dig deeper into this question.

Deborah Heiser:

People can reach me at mentorprojectorg that's the mentor project or deborahisercom. You can find me on psychology today. I'm a contributor there on the right side of 40. And pretty much if you Google me you can find me.

Jay Johnson:

but I really do respond to everybody who reaches out, and so I'm excited to help anybody who wants to learn more about mentoring. Thank you so much, Deborah. Honestly, like I've learned a lot from this conversation, and you know the way you frame it is just, it seems so simple, Like I want to get out there and mentor.

Deborah Heiser:

Now I want to you know I want to go and find my mentor.

Jay Johnson:

You know, go find more mentors, but this has really been inspiring and I appreciate you taking the time to be here with us today. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, audience, for listening into this episode of the Talent Forge, where together, we are shaping the future of training and development.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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