Take a few minutes to take your interns seriously. Everyone will benefit.
I know you’re probably reluctant to ask your interns to sit in for every creative, strategic, and operations meeting in your line of work. The super-power of fleeting youth reminds us of just how far we’ve travelled, how much we’ve learned, and how much young people simply can’t understand the realities of grown up life. Young people remind us of how much we wish we were still young, and how life’s finite clock continues to run down. I get it. I get it. I get it.
Do it anyway. Ask them to participate. Set smart boundaries, of course—this isn’t a democracy, after all!—but invite your interns to sit in, participate, listen, learn, and contribute. When they do, you’ll accomplish several things at once.
First, you’ll be doing the thing that you wish someone had done for you when you were young. You’ll be helping shape someone’s life, constructively one would hope. In a small but meaningful way you’ll also help encourage what’s become a fleeting social value, namely that mutual positive regard has greater merit than endless hardscrabble competition. Set a good example, and in the future they might pay it forward. Think of well run internships as a cultural bulwark against anarchy.
Second, you’ll likely get a great worker, cheap. Sure, your interns won’t know all the stuff seasoned pros know, but if you give motivated interns meaningful assignments you’re likely going to get a huge level of effort for all the right reasons. If someone’s motivated enough to pursue an internship in the first place, he or she is probably motivated to want to make a good showing. Does that mean your science lab interns should get to run experiments with the fusion reactors? It most certainly does not. Big responsibilities—and privileges—must always be earned. But put a well selected intern into a situation with reasonable stakes on the line, and you’ll probably be surprised at how well things turn out. Sure, you’ve got to supervise, but that process alone might remind you of some of the down-to-earth basics you should have never allowed yourself to forget over the years.
Third—and this may be the hardest thing for you to accept—you’ll probably learn something new. You might even learn a lot. Remember when you were young? Sure, your wardrobe was smaller, your life experiences sparser, your social polish a little bumpier around the edges. Your life had fewer obligations. You may not have had a significant other at the time—no kids, no mortgages, and fewer obligations to consume your days. You may have heard more music when you were young, seen more movies, paid more attention to language trends. You may have been more spontaneous. Remember? Interns are like air intake valves, bringing in wafts of the outside world. Yes, those zephyrs can blow the papers around a bit, disrupting order and expectations, but stale air is to creativity like stale air is to biology: choking.
Smartly selected interns are trend spotters, idea generators, culture absorbers, hope machines. They’re looking to build lives—their own—and the by-product of that energy is often an industrious and energetic effort.
Do they need supervision? Absolutely. Only a fool brings in a group of interns with the singular intention of getting free grunt labor for scut work. Interns may not know the ropes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t learn how to set the sails. Show them, or, if you are at the helm of a four masted battle galleon, at least give them a chance to stand on deck while the crew hoists the rigging.
Put them to work, for real. Listen closely to what they have to say. Take them seriously. You’re not too old to remember what it was like to be young.