Mentoring has long been considered an effective form of learning and development for individuals at all walks of life. For those new employees to an organisation, mentoring is a great way to effectively engage and introduce them to an organisation’s culture and help them to navigate. For mid-level employees, both being a mentor and mentee has it’s benefits too. Then, when we get to C-Suite professionals, we often consider them to be great mentors to junior employees. Yet, what we’re beginning to see is the power of reverse mentoring.
What is Reverse Mentoring?
Before we go too far down the road with referencing ‘Reverse Mentoring’, it’s worth setting expectations and definitions. Mentoring is simply the act of an individual sharing their knowledge, skills and experience, to help another individual to develop and grow. You’ll notice here that this definition of mentoring doesn’t actually reference seniority, age or hierarchical structure. Reverse mentoring is not too dissimilar to traditional mentoring. The key difference is that the mentor, in a reverse mentoring relationship, is typically younger, less experienced or more junior in an organisation, but has more experience, knowledge and insights in a key area. This key area could be technology, industry trends, diversity and inclusion, or indeed anything else!
The reality is that for most professionals in work, whether apprentices, recent graduates, mid-level managers or company directors, we’re continually learning. Reverse mentoring encourages C-Suite professionals to be mentored by more junior employees and helps create a culture of learning, whilst also improving communication, knowledge sharing and communication at all levels of a business.
Why Reverse Mentoring?
Last year, understandably, we saw a huge increase in the number of organisations approaching us to look at how mentoring can be leveraged to improve diversity and inclusion initiatives. With transgender rights and racial inequality being highlighted in the last couple of years, there is a large divide in understanding and often in support too. One of the biggest challenges that organisations found, time and time again, was the lack of education, awareness and understanding of challenges that individuals within minority groups or employee resource groups potentially face. Reverse mentoring is one of many ways in which organisations can encourage and empower employees, at all levels, to educate, share experience and help senior leaders to grow and understand.
Reverse mentoring, with the rise of remote working, also saw a huge spike with a focus on technology. As we all had to navigate new technologies and adapt to remote working setups, those tech-savvy junior employees began to mentor senior leaders and C-Suite professionals on how to effectively work remotely, how to use video conferencing and video calling platforms like Zoom, Teams and Google Hangouts, and how to use the technologies effectively. Whilst, of course, the obvious benefit to this is that senior leaders could learn a lot, it also had knock-on effects and benefits to the reverse mentors. These individuals, often new or junior in a business or organisation, had a direct channel of communication to a senior leader, felt empowered with more responsibilities and also, often, improved in confidence and interpersonal skills too.
Where to Start?
So, there are several benefits to remote mentoring, just like that of traditional mentoring. However, where can an organisation start and implement a reverse mentoring programme or reverse mentoring culture? It has to start with senior leaders. If you, as a senior leader, are already engaged in traditional mentoring and mentoring those more junior to you in the business, why not explore where you want to develop and grow, yourself, and try to identify someone in the business more junior than you, who could help you do to so through reverse mentoring?
At the same time, encouraging other C-Suite executives in all departments to put their hands up and volunteer to be mentored, you will begin a movement where senior leaders are seen as being extremely approachable, open to learning and hungry to improve. Put out a communication to departments and ask for junior employees to volunteer to share their experience and mentor senior leaders – you may be amazed at the uptake!
If this sounds like a hassle, then mentoring platforms like PushFar, can significantly reduce workload and help to create streamlined mentoring programmes with minimum resource required to match, manage and report on such mentoring. Or a ‘quick and easy’ approach with minimum buy in can be simply a few email communications and an Excel spreadsheet. Either way, if you are considering ways in which you can improve learning cultures, have a think about how reverse mentoring can help here. After all, of those with a mentor, 97% say they are valuable and that is no different for C-Suite executives.
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- Why Every CEO Should Consider Reverse Mentoring - February 28, 2023
