What’s Your “Ask Me About”?
The hardest part of the exercise wasn’t asking for help. It was admitting what you’re good at.
Thirty-five people. Half in the room, half on a screen, all of them on their lunch break. First State Bank calls the series “One Team United.” It’s called “Ask Me About.” Ninety minutes later, I’d learned more about what gets in the way of trust than I’d planned to teach.
Here’s the belief the whole session rests on: trust requires psychological safety - the ability to be a little vulnerable. In a multigenerational room, nothing demonstrates that more than feeling safe enough to ask for help, and secure enough to offer it.
Traditional mentorship runs one direction: someone newer to the work asks someone with more experience how to do something. That’s useful, and it’s the direction everyone already expects - which is exactly why it doesn’t build much new trust on its own. The psychological safety starts to build when it reverses: when an experienced colleague asks a newer one for help instead. A lot of longer-tenured people genuinely struggle with technology, and when a younger colleague teaches them informally, it does two things at once: the newer person gets recognized for expertise the room hadn’t noticed yet. And everyone else gets the unspoken permission: if someone this experienced can admit they don’t know something, so can I. This builds trust.
Here’s why that matters more than a nice hour together. The strength of a multigenerational team isn’t in spite of the age range in the room - it’s because of it. People newer to the work often bring the kind of thinking that comes from not yet knowing the “right” way to do something: quick to try, quick to adapt. People who’ve been at it longer bring judgment built from having seen a version of this problem before. Neither is worth much on its own, and neither gets used if people are afraid to show where their own knowledge runs out. What does it feel like on a team when asking for help doesn’t put your competence on trial? It’s the same feeling that makes succession planning actually work - not a binder handed over the week someone retires, but knowledge that’s already common, because people have been trading it daily. “Every generation has something to teach and something to learn” only becomes a mantra once people believe both halves of it are true of them personally.
“Ask Me About” comes from the Gentelligence playbook (pp. 83–85). Here’s how it actually unfolded. I asked everyone to think of two things - something they’re good at and willing to teach someone else, work-related or not, and something they’d like to learn — then turn to a partner and share. That’s where I first heard the real obstacle. These were one-on-one, low-stakes conversations, not a performance in front of the whole room. And some pairs still got stuck.
The “want to learn” side came easily: how to cook, how to fix a car, how to improve a golf game, where AI is headed, how to get HR accredited. The “good at” side took more coaxing, even one-on-one.
One woman, thirty-five years at the bank, answered the “good at” question with a single word: “Anything.” I asked her to be more specific. She thought about it. “Well, I like construction loans. But I’ve been here so long, I know how every department in this bank works, and how it’s changed.” I almost let the first answer slide, assuming she was brushing off the exercise. She wasn’t. She had a view of the whole organization that almost nobody else in the room had - it just took a direct question to get her to say it out loud.
That’s not just nerves about speaking up in front of a crowd - there wasn’t one. For some of us, the hard part isn’t asking for help. It’s claiming expertise. We call it modesty - keeping our light under a bushel - but what it actually does is keep us from knowing ourselves. She didn’t know, until I pushed, that thirty-five years of watching a bank change from the inside is exactly the kind of thing worth teaching.
Try it yourself. Detach for a second from your work self. Think of something you’re passionate about outside of work - something you’re good at, something you’d be willing to teach someone else. That’s your “Ask Me About.”
Full disclosure: I’m bad at this game myself. I’m passionate about theatre, but I can’t picture anyone asking for help planning a trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, so I usually invent an easier answer instead. “Ask me how to make a good batch of cinnamon rolls” - which is wishful thinking. I don’t actually make cinnamon rolls. I’d just like to.
Now go back to what you wrote, and ask the harder question: how does that skill show up at work? Scaling a recipe for forty relatives takes the same on-the-fly adjusting as reworking a plan when the budget changes midstream. Figuring out what’s wrong with a car draws on the same instinct as figuring out what’s wrong with a process that keeps stalling. A good golf game takes the patience to fail in front of people and try again anyway. None of that shows up on a résumé. All of it shows up at work, if you let it.
Let the Matchmaking Begin!
Once the two lists - what people would teach, what they wanted to learn - were both out in the open, the room matched needs with services on its own. The youngest person there wanted to learn to cook - by the end of the session she had three women lined up to teach her carbonara, chai, and how to feed a crowd. Two people who wanted to learn accounting and HR, respectively, found out they already worked in those departments and started trading what they knew on the spot.
Some of that knowledge was already there, just never written down. The next step is making it visible on purpose: a shared document where people list what they’d teach and what they’d like to learn, at work and outside it. Add a column for requests. Don’t be surprised when someone reads it and realizes they’re exactly the person somebody else needs.
My host, April Matalavy, put it better than I could. She wrote afterward: “Thank you for providing take-aways (like the skills exchange) that we can put into practice immediately.”
Put together, this is really just mentorship running in both directions - co-mentoring, not a hierarchy where one person always teaches and the other always learns. That’s the shift worth naming out loud, because it’s the shift that makes people trust each other enough to keep doing it.
Every one of us is under some kind of pressure at work, no matter what generation we belong to. Under pressure, there’s a choice: blame, withdraw - or ask for help and offer to teach. I didn’t ask the room on Sept. 10 what that second choice would do for the organization as a whole. I got too caught up watching the pairs form. So I’m asking you instead: which choice is your team making right now, and what would the effect look like if that changed?
Try This: Ask Me About
A 15-minute trust-building exercise, adapted from the Gentelligence playbook (pp. 83–85), that pairs what your team already knows how to do with what they want to learn next.
What you need
A group of any size. Paper and pen for each person. Fifteen to twenty minutes.
How it works
1. Ask everyone to write down two short lists: things they’re good at and willing to teach someone else — work-related or not — and things they’d like to learn. Encourage more than one item on each list. They can decide which one to lead with once the matching starts.
2. Let people circulate the room, comparing lists and looking for matches — someone’s “can teach” against someone else’s “want to learn.” Give it real time. This is where the matches happen.
3. Bring the room back together. Ask a few people to call out what’s on their lists, out loud — not just what they noticed, but the actual topics.
4. Close by naming what’s in front of the room: all of that knowledge, and how much of it crosses generations to get there.
What to expect
Naming what you want to learn usually comes faster than naming what you’re good at — modesty runs deep, even with time to write it down. Give people space for the second list, and don’t let anyone off the hook with “I don’t know, nothing really.” Everyone has something.
Make it stick
The lists are already written — collect them into a shared, living document: two columns, “I can teach” and “I’d like to learn,” open to the whole team. It’s also the natural way to fold in anyone who joined remotely or hybrid and couldn’t circulate live. Someone will read it later and realize they’re exactly the person somebody else needs.
Every generation has something to teach and something to learn.