Steve Doswell on mentorship, experience and the loss of a legend in his monthly column 

"To enter the realm of learning is usually to exit the zone of comfort."

A respected and popular social media guru brought her disarming personality, warmth and wisdom to a June networking event in Milton Keynes in which over 50 IC practitioners took part. I’ve seen and heard Rachel Miller speak several times but I always learn something new. Admittedly, my base of social media knowledge began low, so there’s plenty to learn. Even so, I think it’s more about Rachel: she’s able to deliver fresh insights and examples because she herself is keen to learn and she clearly devotes a fair proportion of her time to monitoring developments in ‘social.’

A willingness to continue learning and the humility to assume that one doesn’t know it all already, are essential for anyone who wants to master their brief, be it in IC or any other field. However humble or lofty our position, whatever our experience, we all need to keep up with new ideas, reread classic texts, or try out unfamiliar tools and techniques. There’s a double benefit. Not only might we challenge, refresh or re- affirm our thinking, or acquire a new tool or technique for our work, but the mere fact of reading about our subject or of trying something new gives our minds (and hands) added dexterity. Besides, if you’ve seen it all and done it all before, how do you keep adding value to your work and, more fundamentally, what is there to look forward to?

Of course, to enter the realm of learning is usually to exit the zone of comfort. Sometimes what holds us back is a fear of looking stupid as we struggle on the nursery slopes of a not- yet-fully-mastered new skill. There’s the added challenge that physical and mental agility tend to decline over time. Set against that, determination and the will to endure may increase with the passing years, so the two tendencies probably balance each other.

There’s real personal and organisational joy to be had when people of different age or status develop mutual respect by learning from each other. I’ve mentioned in this column before the example of a global firm that matched junior employees with social networking skills to share with less digitally adept seniors who nonetheless had organisational nous aplenty to impart. It was such a smart and enlightened idea to broker the skills capital of two very different generations in that way. I’d be honoured to meet whoever hit upon that idea.

Young practitioners, though often skilled in digital, can learn from the experience and maturity of their mentors.

I was saddened by the sudden death of comedian Mel Smith at the ridiculously premature age of just 60. There have been many tributes notably for his work on Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones. Many will remember him as one half of a classic comic duo with Griff Rhys Jones. Their two-heads routines were among the enduring images of the 1980s for so many people. And for those who worked at Nationwide Building Society during that period, Mel and Griff were also the public voice of their employer, thanks to a sequence of radio ads in which they brought their then- ubiquitous voices to the task of advertising Nationwide loans and savings products. Mel and Griff also helped the IC effort at the time. Allowing a camera crew into their radio rehearsal, they were generous with their time and humour, gently poking fun at the slightly over-awed PR officer tasked with interviewing them for Video View, Nationwide’s quarterly staff video in that period. I remember it well because I was that starstruck PR man. I cringe now at how gauche it must have seemed but I treasure the memory. RIP Mel.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication You can find him on Twitter @stevedoswell