Reverse Mentoring: Why and How to “Do it Yourself” with a Cross-Generational Mentoring Program
Show me the mentors! Even though mentoring is one of the most effective career development paths for young employees, only one in five organizations offers a formal mentoring program. This is in spite of the need for fast, point-of-need learning partnerships to help organizations share critical knowledge, onboard a new hire, develop talent, and grow future leaders.
This makes it very likely that you and your organization’s managers are left high and dry when it comes to mentoring newer or younger employeesundefinedbut it doesn’t mean you can’t set up an effective program yourself! Managers and supervisors at all levels have a simple, viable strategy available for providing mentoring to their teams without waiting for HR or senior management to set up a formal program. This do-it-yourself (DIY) option is called “reverse mentoring” because it turns around mentoring as we know it.
What Is Reverse Mentoring?
Traditionally, a person with more experience will mentor a colleague with less experience; this method has been proven through master/apprentice relationships that have allowed knowledge to be handed down over hundreds of years. In reverse mentoring, a more experienced employee, or even a manager, actively seeks the council of an employee with less overall experience. This modern twist has more tenured employees depending on younger staff for fresh perspectives, trend spotting, and technology guidance.
As Alan Webber, cofounder of Fast Company put it, “Reverse mentoring is when the old fogies in the organization realize that by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, you’re not in touch with the future in the same way as the young twenty-somethings. They come with fresh eyes, open minds, and instant links to the technology of our future.”
Reverse mentoring refreshes learning for veteran employees and managers, while helping to build leadership skills and experience of your newer employeesundefinedwho are, of course, also learning new insights during the relationship. And when you pair an experienced manager or employee with a newer, less tenured employee, the mentor gets a glimpse into the world of leadership and top-level leadersundefinedsomething the younger generations particularly value.
Why Reverse Your Mentoring?
Reverse mentoring has some unique benefits that should be of special interest to most industries; many of those benefits have to do with attracting and keeping employees in the Millennial generation (those born between 1977 and 1998)undefinedan essential demographic for any forward-thinking organization.
These six benefits specific to reverse mentoring are just the tip of the iceberg:
- Helps to engage, retain, and promote younger talent; it creates a two-way conversation, allowing supervisors to learn what workplace conditions younger employees seek in order to advance themselves along with the interests of the company
- Engages younger and newer employees, promoting their loyalty and generating trust
- Empowers emerging and established leaders
- Shrinks big organizations; it crosses boundaries that employees wouldn’t normally cross
- Begins to close the knowledge gap between long-time employees and newer hires
- Offers different, fresh and/or younger perspectives
Reverse mentoring is ideal in situations when you want established employees and managers to gain technical expertise, whether it is in business applications or smart phone apps. The same is true of learning about new and emerging trends in marketing or areas of work and society that might impact your business.
It can also strengthen the team even as it grows the skills and strengths of individuals involved. For example, when you pair a people-savvy associate with a manager working on winning over a prospective client, everyone can benefit.
Success Story
At Werner Electric in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, President Ben Granley has tapped into reverse mentoring in an effective if informal way. Their Millennial delivery driver Dustin Ranem regularly visits the company’s marketing department to provide his perspective on the company’s social media presenceundefinedand to give specific recommendations. When Granley was promoted to president, he asked the same employee to review his LinkedIn page and his social media presence and give Granley a list of recommended improvements.
“He has educated our entire organization about the power of social media, and corrected some of our mistakes,” says Granley. “He has helped me out personally with Twitter chats and more.”
Best Practices for Reverse Mentoring
Before you send a seasoned executive and an intern into a conference room and say “Go,” there are a few high-level guidelines that you may want to consider. No matter how simple you intend the structure of your mentoring program to be, take time to make a plan.
Reverse mentoring can take place as informally as you likeundefinedor even within your existing company mentoring programs. It simply calls for matching up pairs of employees of different generations and then encouraging them to meet regularly to exchange ideas and challenge each other. Note that these relationships shouldn’t be restricted to people of the same gender or who have similar backgroundsundefinedbecause we can learn so much more from people who are different from ourselves.
Take some time to consider what we call the “hard glue and soft glue” that can hold a successful program together:
Hard Glue:
- Define expectations. Both partners need to be very clear on what they want to accomplish.
- Agree on the rules. Each partner must be fully committed to the mentoring relationship with regular meetings and activities, and to getting together at least monthly. And partners should agree to be cooperative and respectful.
Soft Glue:
- Willing to learn. In a reverse mentoring relationship, both parties must genuinely want to learn from and share with the other.
- Mutual trust. The goal is to push one another outside of their comfort zones and try new ways of thinking, working and being. Ideally, the pair will create a safe, risk-taking environment and maintain confidentiality.
- Transparency. Both partners must be open with their feelings and with what they are thinking. They must be able to overcome differences in communication style and be open to seeing situations from different angles.
Our research shows that the biggest dangers to any successful mentoring relationship are neglect (a lack of commitment, time, and energy), breaches of confidence, and the failure to understand culture and generational differences. As you implement your reverse mentoring program, be on the lookout for these pitfalls.
In the second article in this series, you can review a basic action plan for your reverse mentoring program. Check back next month for part 2.
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For more information about mentoring as a talent development strategy, and leveraging the generations in your workplace for exceptional business results, contact Devon Scheef at The Learning Café. DevonS@thelearningcafe.net or (805) 494-0124.
