This post was written by Anjie Cayot, Co-founder & President at Keyot.
As business owners, we need the diversity of our workforce to be representative of the diversity of our customer base. That’s the easiest way to identify our customers’ needs. Companies that have grasped this concept are thriving.
Too many large corporations are focused on years of experience when filling roles, instead of looking at each person’s capabilities and blending their capabilities with others’. There’s another consideration: Those of us in the later stages of our careers must be transitioning the work to newer generations, if we want to secede and retire. Creating multigenerational teams is the smartest way to proceed or your best talent may retire all at once.
There is no gamble to this approach. When Keyot creates a cream-of-the-crop multigenerational team, our clients get the best ideas and the most unique methods. Personally, I’d take half the number of people and commit to doubling the output if I had a robust multigenerational team.
The key to creating incredible multigenerational teams is providing an environment in which the younger team members can thrive. By the time they arrive at our clients’ workplaces, Keyot has often been working with, and preparing, our young, talented professionals for years.
We begin identifying talented young professionals while they are still in high school and college through Trailblazers, Crew212 and other avenues. Keyot looks for three things: analytical capability, proven work ethic and emotional intelligence (EQ). If they have those three raw skills, we can mentor them and help them apply those skills in numerous roles.
Gone are the days when people went to school to study finance, for example, then pursued a finance career. Most college students don’t have any idea what they want to do with their degrees. They come out of school with myriad skills. It’s a big passion in Crew212 to help these young professionals find their way into corporate project delivery roles. Meanwhile, our senior team is working next to the Crew212 team, helping them understand the subject matter and teaching them project discipline.
By placing these highly motivated Crew212 consultants at the right assignment at a client, and mentoring them for up to two years, close to 500 young people in 10 states are now thriving in careers to which they never would have had access. This increasingly popular program illustrates how to combine senior and junior resources for incredibly successful, long-term outcomes.
At the end of the project, our senior people leave, and the client gets to keep the Crew212 team and convert them into valuable employees. In this way, we help them to plant future leaders who already have the experience in compliance remediation. They not only know how to fix the problem but also understand the situation that caused it.
Keyot is all about enablement not dependence. At the end of a project, we want you to say, “When Keyot left, our team was better off than we were before Keyot came on board.”
