Brain surgery, government accounting, and aluminum production. These work environments may be totally different, but all three fields face a related problem. How do leaders improve knowledge transfer to the next generation of their workforce? One of the quickest ways to do this is to enhance the mentoring skills of your most experienced employees.

Recently, I gave a keynote address to 500 neurosurgeons and their colleagues in other surgical specialties. Speaking to the North American Skull Base Society (NASBS) taught me four things about mentoring that can help leaders in many fields.

Define specific contexts where mentoring must improve

The surgeons I spoke to were concerned with improving the quality of mentoring in their highly team-oriented skull base subspecialty. But there are many different situations where mentoring is needed in their field. Among these:

• Senior attending surgeons mentoring young residents or more experienced fellows, who are much more advanced in their training
• Experienced surgeons from different specialties teaching each other
• Young surgeons working with new technologies that need to be shared with veteran colleagues

Each of these situations requires different mentoring skills, relationships and content. When talking about “mentoring” in your organization, be clear about the context where knowledge transfer is taking place.

In addition, my interviews with skull base surgeons showed that mentoring skills must be addressed at three levels. Most people are focused only on improving their own mentoring (or mentee) capabilities, but leaders must also focus on improving knowledge transfer capabilities across their department, function, or company.

In some cases, truly visionary leaders will worry about mentoring across their industry or professional specialty, thinking about the overall knowledge base of their field, such as a surgical subspecialty or another discipline requiring complex expertise.

Ask yourself: Are we enhancing knowledge transfer capabilities at the right level for our organization or profession?

Expect new technologies to change mentoring dynamics

In skull base surgery, new technologies now permit endoscopic brain procedures that have made many operations less invasive. In some cases, veteran surgeons, trained to perform more traditional open skull surgery, have unexpectedly found their skills in less demand when new technologies made less invasive procedures more attractive.

In these situations, younger surgeons may need to teach more experienced physicians to use the new technologies (i.e., reverse mentoring). In this case, the challenge is that the open skull techniques are still going to be essential in certain situations. This knowledge needs to be retained somehow and passed on to a new generation of surgeons.

The rapid evolution in technologies in many fields is changing the dynamics of mentoring, so the critical skill sets needed mean less experienced employees are more likely to be cast in the role of teacher.

But one vexing challenge is when the value of a veteran’s expertise becomes less central – but still essential – to their profession. How do you keep this know-how alive when older techniques are no longer as valued? Making this dilemma discussable is the first step in addressing it.

Letting Go: When to Let a Young Surgeon Take Over the Scalpel

In many jobs it doesn’t matter if less experienced professionals make mistakes. That’s not true in surgery, however, where mistakes need to be avoided wherever possible. Attending surgeons always face the challenge of deciding when their junior colleagues are ready to take over a particular procedure.

In many cases, there is an established protocol for giving a surgical resident more responsibility. But there are still many situations where a mentor must make a judgment call about when their protégés have learned enough to begin operating independently.

Sometimes, of course, organizations will have no choice. Less experienced employees are thrown into positions whether they are ready or not. But in other cases, this “sink-or-swim” approach creates unacceptable risks that mentors and their bosses must recognize and carefully manage.

NASA lost one of its Mars probes some years ago when inexperienced software engineers developed a faulty program that would have been easily caught and corrected by a veteran engineer. Are you aware of where your less experienced employees are being asked to take on responsibilities that put the organization at serious risk?

Address Learning Overload – The New Productivity Crisis

Neurosurgeons go through a seven-year surgical residency before they can practice independently. In addition, physicians pursuing a subspecialty, like skull base surgery, will do another year of training as a fellow. This extended training period reflects how much there is to learn to become a skilled surgeon.

But several of the skull base surgeons I interviewed said the training process today is too long, and the profession needs to find ways to shorten the path to becoming a competent surgeon.

This highlights a trend that I see consistently across different professions today. There is simply too much to learn to become competent in many fields the way jobs are structured. Whether it is accounting, technical sales or medicine, many organizations have created unrealistic expectations about how much and how fast employees can and should absorb new knowledge to do their jobs effectively.

The phenomenon of learning overload suggests two things. First, leaders need to rethink role design, performance expectations and training processes for their young staff. And, second, more creative learning approaches must be exploited to accelerate and improve the process.

One example is “micro learning,” which recognizes that shorter attention spans, the demand for real time learning, and improved technologies can combine to meet a pressing need in the workplace. Learning in bite size chunks may not be useful in brain surgery, but it can be very effective for practical task performance in other professions.

The rapid development of new technologies is transforming the skills needed in many fields. Neurosurgeons I spoke with can now envision a future where operations are conducted with physician-guided robots. But no matter how much technology changes actual practice in a profession, there will always be a need for skilled mentoring to share the lessons of experience and expert practice.

Brain surgeons are just one highly skilled profession that provides a window into how the challenges of mentoring are changing. We would do well to pay attention to these lessons.