Interview with Ken Dychtwald on Midlife Crisis
February 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Ken Dychtwald
Ken Dychtwald, founding president and CEO of Age Wave

Second, identify the most valuable middlescent workers. Go beyond the ‘stars’ to identify the next level of valuable workers: the B players, solid contributors whose skills and experience you need to retain. Once you’ve identified them, pay special attention not only to their potential, performance, and progress but also to any warning signs of middlescent disillusionment and stagnation.

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• You have suggested six strategies for revitalizing careers. Can you share with us what those six strategies are and the companies best known for implementing each or all of them?
  In our study we interviewed leading companies nationwide to identify top strategies for engaging and motivating midcareer workers. These include:

1. Fresh assignments.
   A fresh assignment, often in a different geographical location or part of the organization, lets you take advantage of a person’s existing skills, experience, and contacts while letting him or her develop new ones. The best assignments are often lateral moves that mix roughly equal parts old and new responsibilities. Principal Financial Group routinely chooses empty nesters for relocation, particularly those moves that would be difficult for employees with young and growing families. So does GE, which also taps experienced managers to integrate new acquisitions – an ideal way to offer an employee a change of scene and bring to bear a career’s worth of organizational know-how.

2. Career changes.
   Middlescents often dream of – and in some cases end up pursuing – something fundamentally new, Yet jumping the corporate ship is risky, so an employer that can offer an attractive internal career change has a chance to retain valuable talent. An employee may develop a new specialty, assume an altogether different job, or sometimes return fromamanagement track to an individual contributor roll.

3. Mentoring colleagues.
   Putting experienced employees into mentoring, teaching, and other knowledge-sharing roles has the dual benefit of reengaging the midcareer worker and boosting the expertise and organizational know-how of lessexperienced employees. For middlescents, serving as amentor is a personally fulfilling way to share a lifetime of experience, give back to the organization, and make a fresh set of social connections in the workplace. Mentor relationships are often stereotyped as one-way transfers from old to young for the purposes of youthful personal development and career advancement. In fact, they should be viewed as a two-way pairing of knowledge to gain with knowledge to share. That’s how mentoring works at Intel, where the partner may outrank the mentor. The program began in a chip-making factory in New Mexico in 1997, when Intel was growing, and many of the factory’s managers and technical experts were being transferred to new locations. New experts needed to be developed in a variety of fields. So the factory’s top managers started matching partners with mentors who had the needed skills and knowledge. Today, a companywide employee database, which tracks skills attained and desired, helps match partners with mentors, who (thanks to the Internet) may be in another country. Bothmentor and partner take a class to learn some guidelines what to talk about, how to maximize the mutual benefit of their relationship and then they set the details of that relationship in a contract that specifies goals and deadlines.

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