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How do you create a culture that takes in people with the worst résumés on the planet and turns them into productive and contributing team members?

If you think you’ve wrestled with that leadership challenge, you probably haven’t met Mimi Silbert. Perhaps her name doesn’t resonate, but the name of her organization might: the <a href="https://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/ourstory.php" target="_blank">Delancey Street Foundation</a>, based in San Francisco. For more than four decades, her nonprofit has helped turn around the lives of more than 18,000 ex-cons, drug addicts and prostitutes. Over the years, she and her foundation have been covered in the national press and the subject of multiple broadcasts, including ABC World News Tonight, Street Stories With Ed Bradley and an Oprah special. They’ve also inspired fistfuls of academic papers.

&nbsp;What it is about Delancey Street’s core values, beliefs and systems that explain its <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/john-c-maxwell-you-are-filled-with-extraordinary-potential">extraordinary</a> success? Or a recidivism rate that is 30 to 35 percent, something few prison systems or rehab centers have even come close to? The secret isn’t a great fleet of social workers. Overseeing 350 mostly hardened criminals, Silbert runs the place by herself with only a handful of volunteers. She lives on the premises, where she raised a couple of sons there. There isn’t a single guard in the facility. There are no locked doors. And, despite a population rife with convicted murderers and armed robbers, she says not a single act of violence has been committed there in 43 years.

Trained as a clinician working within the prison system, Silbert earned a doctorate from U.C. Berkeley in criminology and psychology. She has a simple approach. “It’s your life,” explains the 73-year-old, 4-foot-11-inch dynamo. “What you do with it makes a difference—and you control what happens to it.”

Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/rohn-4-reasons-to-take-control-of-your-destiny">4 Reasons to Take Control of Your Destiny</a>

Silbert offers these leadership tips from her experience working with ex-cons:

<h2>1. Teach responsibility.</h2>

Because Delancey Street has no staff, everyone has a specific role to help run the place. There is something deeply engaging about feeling the daily responsibility of being needed, Silbert explains. It’s a new experience for most people entering the facility.

<h2>2. Put a price on effort: Make everyone earn everything.</h2>

Residents earn the chance to move from one job to another, from washing dishes in the café, say, to waiting on tables and serving the public. Everyone earns the chance to move up from the nine-person bunk room, where each resident starts an average four-year stay, to upgraded quarters with fewer roommates. No one can talk his or her way out of trouble or into special privileges. Emphasizing that even self-esteem has to be earned, Silbert provides the structure to win respect through <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/blog/john-c-maxwell-do-more-than-accomplish-achieve">accomplishment</a>.

<h2>3. Create positive change by learning from the worst mistakes.</h2>

Out of the cultural building blocks of Delancey Street is the conviction that people don’t have to be held hostage by their criminal pasts. They can make new lives for themselves. Pushing Delancey Street residents to shift their energy and actions from criminal intentions and behaviors to productive work that benefits others, Silbert gives fast <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/5-strategies-for-giving-phenomenal-feedback">feedback</a>, sometimes in the brutal language of their barred past. Slip a notch, and she will call you out, loudly, even in a public setting. But the idea is to call attention to a problem in order to deal with it. “We all make terrible mistakes because we’re human,” she says, “but no matter what you do, everything is fixable.”

Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/blog/john-c-maxwell-how-to-make-the-most-of-your-mistakes">How to Make the Most of Your Mistakes</a>

<h2>4. Turn improvements into teaching opportunities.</h2>

“Each one, teach one,” is a basic precept at Delancey Street. This principle applies as much to helping someone improve reading comprehension or learning communication skills as it does to passing along lessons about dignity and how to wear a dress or suit and tie properly. A core tenet of Delancey Street: “As soon as I learn, I become a teacher.”

That sort of tag-team teaching pushes residents through the most basic skills so they can work in Delancey Street’s restaurant, café, moving company or auto repair. Often it’s their first regular job; some of these people are third-generation gang members. By learning a trade and earning money that helps pay for food and the upkeep of the facility, the residents begin to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/9-tips-to-help-you-strengthen-your-integrity">learn about integrity</a> and dignity. Silbert herself is a pretty good model of self-reliance with a side of selflessness: She has never accepted government aid (and she herself draws no salary).

<h2>5. Underscore every lesson with clear rules—and penalties.</h2>

Of course, there are rules at Delancey Street—lots of them. There are rules about personal hygiene and dorm neatness. There are <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/5-real-world-rules-of-the-workplace">rules about the workday</a>, from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., six days a week. There are rules about stepping out of line; do that and you end up washing dishes in the restaurant. There are rules about quitting the premises; you need a really a good reason to regain admission. And there are rules about never threatening anyone; that leads to automatic expulsion with no hope of returning. As the rules become habitual, behaviors begin to change. The Latino gang member and the white supremacist—once so full of mutual hatred they lay awake all night fearing attack—learn to get along because they have to: They’ve lived in the same dorm room since day one.

Part mom, part shrink, part probation officer, Silbert loves her people and they love her. But it’s love on the tough end of the spectrum. She is certainly no pushover. You live by her laws or you’re out. But residents know just how she has helped them turn their lives around, and that makes them loyal. “That’s why I don’t need protection,” she laughs. “I’ve got 350 bodyguards.”

Delancey Street is the result of her early work with the California prison system, designed as an alternative to incarceration or a condition of parole. Co-founded with $1,000 from a loan shark, the foundation was named after the Lower East Side neighborhood where Silbert’s Jewish immigrant parents grew up.

In 1992, when the organization outgrew its Victorian home, Silbert found a huge, rundown piece of real estate in the Embarcadero, near San Francisco Bay. After buying it, she had no money to hire a construction crew. So she learned the trade, got licensed and put her own people to work. A good example of showing by doing. Today, it’s a 350,000-square-foot residence and retail complex. And Silbert has extended her reach by opening five additional Delancey Street affiliates around the U.S., from Los Angeles to the Carolinas to New York City.

Love your people, believe in them, call them out when they <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/ziglar-3-things-to-do-when-you-make-a-mistake">make mistakes</a>—but especially when they do well—and they will become more than you or they can imagine.

Related: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/7-ways-to-build-your-employees-self-confidence">7 Ways to Build Your Employees' Self-Confidence</a>

How Mimi Silbert turns around the lives of the most hardened criminals

How Mimi Silbert turns around the lives of the most hardened criminals | SUCCESS

5 Leadership Lessons From Ex-Cons

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5 Leadership Lessons From Ex-Cons | SUCCESS

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David Sturt is an executive vice president of the O.C. Tanner Institute and author of The New York Times best-selling book Great Work: How to Make a Difference People Love. His career began in market research, where he studied and analyzed the effects of people being recognized for great work. In the two decades since, he has researched and developed several multimillion-dollar services that engage employees, inspire above and beyond contribution, and reward outstanding results in organizations around the world.

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David Sturt

older man in the veteran career stage at work

While people are <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">leaving their jobs</a> for myriad reasons, one thing is consistent—<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/quitting-isnt-the-enemy-weve-been-told-it-is-heres-how-to-know-when-the-time-is-right/">people aren’t staying</a> in the same job for too long. The median tenure of many employees is at or less than five years.



A 2022 report from the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bureau of Labor Statistics</a> provides further details. According to the report, “the median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2022, unchanged from the median in January 2020.” The median tenure for women was 3.8, lower than the median tenure of 4.3 years for men. Older workers (those “ages 55 to 64”) had a median of 9.8 years of employment, while workers “ages 25 to 34 years” had a median employment of 2.8 years. Additionally, employees in public-sector positions had a median employment rate of 6.8 years, as well as those in “management, professional and related occupations” at an even 5 years.



“Wage and salary workers” with at least 10 years of employment in the same position were primarily white (28%), male (28%) and older (“among workers ages 60 to 64, 53% had been employed for at least 10 years with their current employer in January 2022,” according to the report.)



But let’s focus on one specific generation—Generation Xers, born between 1965 and 1980. The <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">second-largest population in the workforce</a>, they’re squeezed between baby boomers and millennials.



Gen Xers can easily get lost in the shuffle. Yet they have plenty of career gas left in their tanks—although that’s not a choice for everyone. According to the “<a href="https://transamericainstitute.org/docs/default-source/research/emerging-from-the-covid19-pandemic-four-generations-retirement-press-release.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">22nd Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey</a>,” only 22% of Gen X is “very confident” that they will be able to retire comfortably and just 28% feel that they will have enough retirement savings. On the flipside, “38% expect to retire at age 70 or older or do not plan to retire, and 55% plan to work in retirement,” according to the survey results. 



<h2 id="h-career-stages-based-on-years-at-one-company">Career stages based on years at one company</h2>



So if you want your Gen X employees to hang around longer than a few years as motivated, engaged and productive contributors, what can you do <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/discover-the-formula-for-happy-employees/">to keep them from bolting</a>?



First, recognize that careers have stages, each appropriate to a length of tenure. At the O.C. Tanner Institute, we generated a survey of thousands of people across the country who had been at their jobs between 1 and 30 years. We came up with a psychological snapshot that showed, unsurprisingly, that people had different needs and kinds of engagement depending on how long they had been at the same company. Here’s how those career stages broke out:



<ul><li>Year 1: Learning: You’re still a “sponge,” soaking it all up but starting to add value.</li><li>Year 3: Fitting in: You’re in the groove, focused on growing and curious about what might be ahead.</li><li>Year 5: Expertise: You’ve sacrificed a lot to become an authority, but you wonder, What’s next? and Should I start somewhere else?</li><li>Year 10: Belonging: Your co-workers are part of your extended family. You’re committed to the company’s goals as if they were your own.</li><li>Year 15: Invested: You see lifelong value from your partnership with the company and have cultivated a personal sense of ownership, watching for waste and looking to make improvements.</li><li>Year 20: Veteran: You’ve seen a lot of change in your own life and that of the company. You collaborate, <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/lead-by-example-4-elements-of-true-inspiration/">lead and inspire others</a>.</li><li>Year 25: Triumph: This is a time for celebrating past victories and passing along what you know to the next generation. You still have a lot to contribute.</li><li>Year 30: Mentor: <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/how-gratitude-works/">Your sense of gratitude</a> and indebtedness encourages you to teach others, go out with a bang and <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/what-is-a-great-legacy/">leave a legacy</a> as you prepare to retire.</li></ul>



<h2 id="h-career-stages-to-focus-on-to-get-employees-to-stay">Career stages to focus on to get employees to stay</h2>



Grasping what these milestones mean for employees, as well as coming up with ways of enriching the work experience of those employees, might encourage Gen Xers to stay longer. Consider the three stages appropriate to this generation—Belonging, Veteran and Mentor:



<h3 id="h-belonging">Belonging</h3>



How do you help Gen Xers reach that 10-year milestone? <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Help them find their purpose</a>. Gen Xers whom I know (including myself) believe there’s far more to life than aggressive quarterly performance. Help them enjoy work by providing them with a reason to put effort into it.



Try evangelizing employee experience, just as you may evangelize <a href="https://www.zendesk.com/blog/what-is-brand-evangelism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">corporate identity</a> and <a href="https://www.productboard.com/blog/evangelizing-product-vision-and-strategy/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">product vision</a>. At a conference I attended, Clif Bar co-founder Gary Erickson said he conducted weekly all-staff meetings at headquarters in Emeryville, California, to discuss company-wide initiatives, but also to let folks talk about causes that interested them. If you’re running a dog-walk fundraiser, planning a weekend’s work for Habitat for Humanity or starting an organic garden, you can have 15 minutes to talk about the program and ask for volunteers. The idea is to create small communities of like-minded people within the broader community of the organization.



<h3 id="h-veterans">Veterans</h3>



As of 2015, I’d crossed my 20th anniversary at O.C. Tanner, and it felt like a big chunk of my life. I’d accomplished a lot and had a deep appreciation for what it took to make the company successful. Instead of looking at <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/organizational-chart.asp" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the organizational chart</a> as I once did to figure out who can help me get things done, I began to trade on relationships I’d built over the years to help find the experts I needed. Having survived many human and political struggles in the workplace, as well as the ups and downs of the economy, I have plenty of war stories to impart. I know how long it takes to turn the ship or take a project from inspiration to execution.



So, how do you keep employees in the veteran career stage committed to the company? Include them in important projects and initiatives—even if you don’t put them in charge of the group. Veterans can leverage their experience and expertise to help guide the work at hand. Their leadership skills and perspective can help their team cross the finish line.



Once a month at my company, we did an onboarding breakfast with people who had recently joined the company. We honored the folks who’d been there a while, but rather than holding a formal ceremony, we shared stories of veterans—how they wrestled with challenges, came back from failure, got through tough times with industry downturns or engagements with competitors. It was a little like a class reunion, and the younger groups loved those stories—just as we enjoyed hearing older relatives talk to us about the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression or World War II when we were kids.



<h3 id="h-mentors">Mentors</h3>



Maybe it’s the pharaoh phenomenon: the need to build something lasting, if not magnificent, so nobody will forget you once you’re gone. Whatever their motives, older employees may feel driven to pass along some of the big lessons of life at work, helping younger colleagues learn to avoid inefficiencies and landmines or how to get the most out of their careers.



I’ve seen a lot of intergenerational talk over lunch breaks or in executives’ offices. While they may be discussing work-related issues, they’re also discussing personal issues like childrearing and relationships.



Changing up traditional mentorships in the workplace <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/10/why-reverse-mentoring-works-and-how-to-do-it-right" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">with reverse-mentoring</a> puts a little more of the onus on millennials to teach Gen Xers and boomers something about, say, the cloud or mobile computing. It’s a practice first kicked off by former General Electric CEO and chairman Jack Welch in 1999.



There are also less formal ways to keep employees in the mentor career stage interested. One is to involve them in the recruiting and interviewing of new hires. They generally know the required skill sets as well as anyone at the company and can help acculturate promising candidates. Another way is to invite mentors to hold brown-bag lunches with different divisions in the company, leading discussions about new projects and adding some historical context. Finally, some mentors might be encouraged to blog for the company website, allowing them to offer stories and parables about work.



This article was updated April 2023. Photo by Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

If you want to keep employees happy and at your company for longer periods of time, it's key to focus on their career stages. Here's why.

If you want to keep employees happy and at your company for longer periods of time, it's key to focus on their career stages. Here's why. | SUCCESS

Know the 5-Year Job Itch? You Can Fight It by Focusing on Career Stages

Career Stages to Focus on to Keep Employees Happy | SUCCESS

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Professional woman showing man how he made a mistake

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Sheldon Harris, the former president of Cold Stone Creamery, once reprimanded an employee for repeatedly coming in late, only to discover he had been voluntarily cleaning up trash in the parking lot every morning before coming inside. A classic example of “foot in mouth.”



On a much larger scale, imagine how NASA felt when their miscalculations on the Mars Climate Orbiter caused their spacecraft to disintegrate when it passed through the upper atmosphere. They’d used English units instead of metric, resulting in a $125 million mistake.



Yes, these two mistakes were regrettable, but in the long-term, not all mistakes are. Some serve as teaching experiences instead. While conducting research for my book<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071818359/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0071818359&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=OZOK2QC2WNB2UHNZ"> </a><a href="https://amzn.to/3ednGB7" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Great Work</a>, we analyzed 1.7 million cases of award-winning work in the Great Work study. We examined not only the outcomes, but also the <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/why-failure-is-good-for-success/">unexpected benefits gained from mistakes</a>, those which may ultimately serve to advance an organization or a career.



Researchers asked, “What mistakes have you made in your career that benefited you in the long-term?” and “<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/11-tips-for-letting-go-of-past-failures-and-embracing-the-future/">What mistakes have you made</a> that have hurt your career?”



Here are the results—four mistakes that may ultimately prove to be beneficial:



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-1-saying-yes-to-everything">1. Saying yes to everything</h2>



This is a classic and common career mistake, but there is still a great lesson to learn. As one study respondent put it, learning “how to draw a line in the sand and where to draw it” <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/combat-workplace-burnout-by-setting-better-boundaries/">is a good measure</a> against stretching an employee or leader too thin.



Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala, who is currently on Accenture’s board of directors and who formerly served as co-president of QCT at Qualcomm, shared the benefit he found from saying yes to everything: “[Qualcomm] started with seven people. The founders had a simple vision to improve communication, which meant saying yes to possibility. We became the company that no matter what the problem or the deadline, we would find a solution.” A pathway to yes became the hallmark of their excellence.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-2-working-for-a-jerk">2. Working for a jerk</h2>



<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-good-lessons-from-bad-bosses/">A bad boss</a> can be an eye-opener for showing you where you don’t want to work or how you don’t want to treat other people. That’s because you’ve learned firsthand how it feels.



“It seemed like a mistake at the time to accept the position because I had heard the manager was horrible, but I really wanted to gain the experience,” one respondent said. “I ended up learning a lot more about myself than I ever expected.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-3-getting-fired-for-what-you-believe">3. Getting fired for what you believe</h2>



Not everyone will go through <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/things-to-do-if-you-get-fired/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the experience of being fired</a>, and especially not in a heat-of-the-moment confrontation. But this advice came through loud and clear from an employee who had refused to read a script that he deemed misleading and unethical to the company’s vendors.



The employee was fired, but years later reports that he has no regrets. In fact, the willingness to take a strong ethical stand can, in time, serve as a signal of character and strength to the right organization.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-4-assuming-you-re-right">4. Assuming you’re right</h2>



It’s human nature to want to appear knowledgeable in front of our co-workers and customers, and especially in front of our boss. But none of us is an expert in everything.



A few respondents shared the lessons they learned from situations where their<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/blog/how-big-egos-get-in-the-way-of-professional-relationships-and-success"> </a>egos were crushed: Acknowledging the mistake or the lack of knowledge was an opportunity for learning.



Ultimately they learned that it’s OK to be wrong, and the ability to admit when they were led to greater trust and stronger relationships with the other people involved.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-mistake-they-ll-always-regret">The mistake they’ll always regret</h2>



Finally we asked, “What mistakes have you made that hurt you most in the long term?” We received varied answers to the question. One responded, “Allowing some of the best people to leave.”&nbsp;



“Not realizing that I was mistreating people,” was another.



But by and large, the mistakes that leaders continue to regret boiled down to one predominant theme: not saying thank you.



They reflected and focused on failure to <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/5-key-insights-on-treating-employees-with-love-from-leadership-experts-three-and-jackie-carpenter/">appreciate a relationship</a>. And from this study of more than 1.7 million great work outcomes, I would maintain that it is the mistake no executive or company can afford to make.



This article was published in May 2015 and has been updated. Photo by Dean Drobot/Shutterstock.com

[node:summary] - Plus, the one mistake successful people will always regret

Yes, these two mistakes were regrettable, but in the long-term, not all mistakes are. Some serve as teaching experiences instead. | SUCCESS

4 Mistakes That Sometimes Help Your Career

4 Mistakes That Sometimes Help Your Career | SUCCESS

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David Sturt

Latest Articles

5 Leadership Lessons From Ex-Cons

Know the 5-Year Job Itch? You Can Fight It by Focusing on Career Stages

4 Mistakes That Sometimes Help Your Career