Strengthen Your Content Team by Mentoring Millennials—and Let Them Mentor You Too

Deloitte’s report this week on Millennials reconfirmed an important priority of our largest generation: Mentors. Millennials want mentors and understand that good mentoring can be crucial to their career development and long-term success. This reinforces results from a recent survey of young managers published in the Harvard Business Review that found that mentorship was one of the highest-ranking items "important" to them. 
Millennials’ desire to be mentored impacts every functional group in your business, but seems an especially important trend to keep in mind for those of us trying to meet the challenge of creating ever more high quality, sophisticated content to reach and engage audiences that already have too much choice and too many distractions.

One solution we have been developing is Content Team Mentoring, a strategy that can increase both your content creation bandwidth and quality, while forging new connections inside your organization. The goal is simple: You need to try to ensure that expertise and experience are shared among members of your content team to develop talent and skills in all the functional specialties that touch content and communications across your organization.  This is particularly important because your content team is often an amalgamation of internal staff groups who have never before worked together closely—from media relations to digital marketing to customer service and human resources. A content mentoring team pulls them together, enables them to collaborate to solve problems and integrate solutions while they share knowledge and skills needed to excel in their jobs, even as the communications landscape morphs at lightening speed before us. 
Mentoring members of your content team has important, practical benefits.

• First, mentoring generally builds expertise and broadens competencies, increasing your overall capabilities to create the sophisticated content your audience increasingly demands. The generally positive ROI for mentoring programs is well known. 
• Second, mentoring increases retention rates among the content experts on the team. According to the just-released Deloitte report, millennials intending to stay with their organizations for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor (68 percent) than not (32 percent). Among those intending to leave within two years, the ratio of those with (56 percent) and those without (44 percent) a mentor is much lower.
• Third, mentoring helps create all sorts of cross-functional synergies at a time when the traditional marketing and PR silos are disappearing; groups who rarely worked together in the past are now routinely required to collaborate closely in order to meet intense demand for high quality content for all the diverse audiences an organization needs to engage; mentoring programs can help optimize collaborations and help manage change.
• And finally, mentoring helps cross-pollinate diverse skill sets on your content team, which gives you a fighting chance to keep up with external content trends led by new technologies and social platforms you need to identify and master at the speed of light (or so it seems).

Your content team may be especially well suited to a Reverse Mentoring program which, according to HBR “shifts the responsibility for organizing mentoring junior employees, who learn from senior executives by mentoring them. A Millennial is matched to an executive and assigned to teach him or her how to, say, use social media to connect with customers. It’s an effective way to give junior employees a window into the higher levels of the organization, so that when the mentees retire, the younger generation has a better understanding of the business.”
Content creation is consuming more and more of our resources even as we face dire predictions of "saturation." Content Team Mentoring programs may be an important tool to nurture and keep the talent you will need to produce the high quality content that captures your audience's imagination in the era of the (well-documented) eight-second attention span.