Transcript of a conversation between Jim Martin and Christopher Parsons about using informal mentoring, social tools (Finch), and deliberate process to share knowledge and build connections in a hybrid firm. Jim describes a concrete campaign to crowdsource mentoring questions and templates to reduce friction for mentees and mentors; Christopher highlights the cultural and process orchestration behind that work. The discussion emphasizes cultivating vulnerability, experimenting, and co-developing processes rather than top-down mandates.
Chapters
Yeah, I'd say it's still going strong. I actually did a post last, on Friday of last week asking about informal mentoring. So just asking people, it's like, what questions should someone who's looking for mentoring ask someone who's further along in their career? And it was interesting. It got a couple of responses along the lines of, oh, you should do a 40 minute workshop, do a conversation about that. And my response to that was to that came from people who are more senior in their careers because they couldn't think of anything to ask, which I thought was pretty interesting in and of itself. So I started poking every single designer in level one that we have in the entire company and asking them to contribute to that post. And you know, Today we've got 20 responses back on it of really interesting questions which we're going to turn into a Finch page and include example templates for if you are a mentor and you want to offer to mentor somebody, you could use this email template. And if you were a mentee who was interested in being mentored by someone else, you could use this email template. And then here's a list of 50 questions that you could ask to give people inspiration for what to do. Just trying to reduce the friction of the platform. And you know, that is all social enterprise. I mean that is anyone feeling comfortable kind of saying something. The added benefit was that people really appreciated being reached out to and several people commented that they thought was a really important topic to be thinking about and it gave them an opportunity to be seen. And I'm going to see if I can convince the CEO to reach out to every person who responded and say thank you personally because that's a nice touch at the end of the day of the effort. So building campaigns like that, you can really use the social aspect of the Internet in order to build a lot of positive change and a lot of tools and crowdsource things and get people thinking about, oh, I actually I could reach out and ask someone for mentoring. You know, I've got some thoughts of my own about it, but let me just pause on.
I mean I hope people just like so yes, there is a share box. You can write a post, you can get comments in the technology. That is 5% of the story Jim just told. Right? That is a process culture orchestration. Why in the hell is Jim Martin, who works in it, helping us figure out informal mentoring on a Friday? I have questions there like outside the swim lines. But like this is the kind of thing that I've seen Shepley do and not just Jim. I've seen Jess and other folks do stuff like this where it's a very, I feel like it feels secondhand too. Like I don't. Like you knew that. Like, I need to back channel with some people to get like some, some voices heard. Oh, I'm not just going to leave this in the comments of a post. We'll turn this into an asset. We'll figure out how to put it into the flow of work. Like that was such an elegant example of what like great knowledge management looks like. Whether or not you have knowledge management in your title. Like, that kind of thoughtfulness. And I'm curious, like I, I said, culture of experimentation, that's just like, that feels like a very lightweight. Like maybe nothing would have happened, right? Oh, well, you didn't put a lot.
Of it out there and then just wait and see.
Yeah, but like you, as you started seeing you're getting some value, you started ramping up your effort, right, to see if like, oh, this has got some legs. Like, let's see if we can make something out of this. But really like Jim, why informal mentoring on a Friday? Are you asking that question?
Well, I was in the studio on Thursday, was talking to one of the directors and we had a conversation and informal mentoring came up and it became clear to me that she wasn't quite sure how to go about it. And the process that I just articulated is a process that we had developed maybe six years ago or so. And we've got it documented. We know what exploring out loud looks like and how to use the Internet and the culture and the willingness to be vulnerable that we've cultivated in order to generate value for the business. And you know, that's how. So you basically, you come up with an important question that needs a whole bunch of people to kind of ruminate on and to think about. And you create a process that encourages that sort of stuff to pop up on. There has a lot of ancillary benefits of connecting the firm together. We are hybrid. So getting people to connect with each other is really important because a lot of times firms use their physical environment in order to facilitate that connectivity. And at Shepley we don't have that as much. We have offices for certain, but not everyone goes into them all the time. And we want people to be as connected as possible because when they start working on projects together, they've got pre existing relationships to build on in order to make the project process easier. So there's a lot of things that kind of go into it, but it's understanding your tools and then understanding the way that you can use your tools in an elegant way in order to get multiple value propositions satisfied. So, like, you know, I legitimately think that if. If people at our firm felt like there was more friction in order to reach out and get mentoring, the firm would be a better place. But I also think that getting a whole bunch of early career architects and interior designers engaged in thinking about this sort of thing together on Finch is also good for the firm. It's also good if we can create a content after the fact that is more curated, that it has expectations around, social norms kind of baked into it that help people understand what is socially acceptable for them to do. And that, yeah, it's actually okay for you to reach out to your project manager if you do it in this way. And there's a bailout button baked into that process for the project manager. So we're not committing our future project managers to something they're not comfortable with, and we'll kind of go through all that. So it's all about developing process, but developing it together and not just being one person's. I mean, it would be totally inappropriate for me as the CIO of the firm, to sit in a room and think, well, here's a process that we will do to help this thing. Bam, done. You're welcome, people. It's your process, but doing it with everyone else, I think it is. That is how I justify going out of my lane so frequently.
It even seemed like if you'd just gone to the most senior people, that wouldn't have worked either. Right?
They're not the target audience.
Going to the. To the users. What's that?
They're not the target audience.
They're not the target audience. Yeah, yeah.
The target audience is the early career architects and interior designers that we have, because they're the ones that need the mentoring, whether they feel comfortable asking for it or not.
