by Lis Merrick
In the latest in a series of columns dedicated to mentoring, we look at ‘reverse mentoring’ to support senior leadership learning and retain talent. This issue: Turning it on its head
Young staff can learn much from more senior mentors – so why not the other way round?
So what is reverse mentoring? Quite simply, it is usually where a more junior or younger person mentors someone who is more senior or older, so the more usual role-model type relationship is turned on its head. It can be as simple as your child challenging your thinking with a powerful question or helping you send a tweet.
In the workplace, these relationships can develop informally, which may lead to the mentor’s visibility increasing and some potential sponsorship in the future. However, organisations are becoming increasingly aware of how advantageous some formal reverse mentoring relationships can be in stimulating senior leadership learning.
The benefits of reverse mentoring include:
Offering fresh perspectives for senior staff on what is going on in the organisation, the challenges they should engage in, and a useful generational perspective they may not gain from their current learning network.
Bringing in new skills, particularly around using social media. Millennial or Generation Y mentors can encourage their mentees to become more conversant with social media, blogging, mobile computing and other digital technologies, bringing an organisation up to speed through more innovative strategies.
Offering additional opportunities to contribute to the Millennial generation, which have different working needs to Generation X or Baby Boomers. A senior mentee gives them the opportunity to collaborate and feel they are included and treated with respect – all great ways to motivate and keep staff, so an important tool for talent retention!
It is still important if you are setting up a formal programme for participants to be briefed on how mentoring works, their roles and responsibilities, how to build rapport, trust and contract and to keep some focus in their learning, so that it doesn’t just turn into a pleasant social conversation.
It’s also important to help the mentors relax about the first few meetings, so they don’t clam up with their mentee. More time spent on how to initiate rapport across generations and an awareness of how the relationship might turn into a type of performance coaching, is key to ensuring both parties are open to how their relationship unfolds. Any resistance from more senior mentees around their involvement needs to be tackled early on. Some organisations formally reward the participants in order to achieve more buy-in. There must be a genuine willingness to learn on both sides, or it won’t work.
Having a unique focus for the reverse mentoring, such as developing sustainability or gender awareness, can be a lynchpin for the programme, by using mentors who are experts in environmental sustainability or are of the opposite sex. This can be amazingly effective in learning, both for the mentee and mentor.
Perhaps new starters in an organisation could work with older, established managers to share fresh knowledge and business trends from outside the organisation. There are so many different areas where reverse mentoring can be beneficial to developing senior leaders, closing the knowledge and generational gap and empowering the organisation’s talent to contribute more to its future.
Next issue: How to use mentoring for knowledge management within an organisation
Lis Merrick is a consultant and visiting fellow of the Coaching & Mentoring Research Unit at Sheffield Business School. She welcomes correspondence on anything to do with mentoring. Contact: Lismerrick@coach mentoring.co.uk
Coaching at Work, Volume 8, Issue 5