Reciprocal mentoring can deliver plenty of benefits for organisations, including helping to shift the system, but it’s important to get it right.
David Clutterbuck reports
This article offers a practical guide to reciprocal mentoring, including essential components of set up and design, and measurement and review.
Brief history of mentoring
Formal mentoring programmes have been around since the early 1980s but more recently, applications of mentoring have grown, including return-to-work mentoring for working mothers and ethical mentoring for would-be whistleblowers in the
UK National Health Service.
In traditional mentoring schemes, the mentor is a more senior or more experienced person who supports a less experienced person at some point in their career journey. The essence here is that one person uses their wisdom to help another person become wiser.
In the US, mentoring is sometimes confused with sponsorship, but the two roles are largely incompatible. Increasingly, companies are providing employees with both at different stages in their development. In the US sponsorship construct, the social exchange in a mentoring relationship was seen as one of using influence on the mentee’s behalf in return for loyalty. In mainstream ‘pure’ mentoring, however, there was always an element of co-learning, even to the extent that a measure of the success of a mentoring relationship was how much the mentor learned.
Reverse mentoring started as a means of enabling older executives to tap into the technical know-how of younger, more junior employees. The social exchange became that the younger person would access the older person’s insights into the politics of the organisation and learn how to navigate a career within them. Reverse mentoring rapidly morphed into relationships aimed at educating privileged senior people about the world as viewed by people from less privileged groups. The first applications of this type were gender-based, then within culture/ racial identity and more recently around cognitive diversity.
Although there haven’t been any large-scale studies of the impact of reverse mentoring, it seems to be significantly impactful. The senior person in the learning dyad typically gains insights they can use with their direct reports and colleagues from similar backgrounds while the junior person typically learns how to work within a system that perhaps previously constrained them.
And there’s the rub. Helping one executive become more diversity aware and/or one junior employee learn how to ‘fit in’ to the culture has a limited effect. It doesn’t change the system that created the problems in the first place. That’s where reciprocal mentoring comes in.
Reciprocal mentoring
This is a partnership of co-learning equals, despite the difference in status outside the relationship. The impact of the mentoring conversations on each other is only part of the picture. Equally, if not more important is their capacity to change the system.
One of the reasons that change is so difficult to achieve is that different networks and interest groups don’t talk to each other. So, the reciprocal mentoring pair aim to foster those connections, firstly exploring what they can do together as a pair, through their networks.
Systemic change isn’t going to happen just because it is mandated from above, nor will it happen solely as a result of pressure from below. Change one part of the system and it’ll find ways to revert to where it was before. But when the top and the bottom work together, anything is possible!
Benefits
Below are some of the potential benefits of reciprocal mentoring:
- Organisation-wide impact
- Identifies hidden and less obvious barriers to inclusion
- Enables top and bottom of the organisation to work together to bring about change
- Supports senior employees in becoming visible champions for diversity
- Supports junior employees in understanding and working with the organisational systems
- Empowers people to bring about significant change
- Enhances the organisation’s reputation as an exemplary employer
Essential components of set up and design
The starting point for planning mentoring programmes generally is the standards framework from EMCC Global (International Standards for Mentoring and Coaching Programmes – ISMCP at: emccglobal.org). Developed over two decades, these set out key provisions for a successful mentoring initiative. Many organisations have had their programmes assessed against the standards. This not only gives an external benchmark but also provides an opportunity to evaluate each aspect of your programme in detail and compare it with international good practice.
The same standards apply for reciprocal mentoring but there are multiple additional issues to consider.
The six core standards are:
1. Clarity of purpose
2. Training and briefing
3. Selection and matching
4. Measurement and review
5. High standard of ethics
6. Administration and support
Below, we examine what else might be included in addition to the usual elements of the standards from a reciprocal mentoring perspective.
1. Clarity of purpose
From a reciprocal mentoring perspective, a purpose statement might look something like this:
We aim to create powerful learning partnerships that will exert a significant influence on how both individuals and the organisation as a whole bring about positive and lasting change in the context of diversity and inclusion. The success of the programme will be seen in:
- Increased and demonstrable commitment at all levels in the organisation to recognising and addressing barriers to diversity and inclusion
- Increased sense of belonging among less privileged colleagues
- Retention of diverse talent
- Releasing the creativity that comes from valuing difference
To ensure that the statement of purpose resonates widely, it’s good practice to establish a steering group, representing various stakeholders.
2. Training and briefing
If participants in reciprocal mentoring already have experience as mentors in other contexts, a simple refresher event will usually be enough to remind them of their roles and responsibilities. However, there are additional educational needs. In particular:
- The skills of managing relative hierarchical power, to create a learning relationship of true equals
- An understanding of organisational systems and how they constrain or liberate talent
- ‘Cultural intelligence’ – knowing how to explore the world of someone from a different background and how to develop insights into one’s own culture
- How to work together with other mentoring pairs to bring about positive systemic change
- How to achieve the level of psychological safety and emotional disclosure to support each other in sometimes uncomfortable self-learning.
This is a long way from standard diversity training. It needs to be concrete, experiential and include tools and techniques that’ll most likely be very new to participants. So, it’s important to allow enough time – for example, an initial intensive day, followed by supported co-learning groups, or several two-hour webinars.
A key question is whether to train all participants together, or to separate the junior and senior employees into different training sessions. Factors to take into account include previous mentoring training, and the level of openness in the organisational culture. A pragmatic option may be to have some sessions together and some apart.
3. Selection and matching
In typical mentoring programmes, a common matching criterion is similarity of learning journey and experience between the mentor (looking back) and the mentee (looking forward). In reciprocal mentoring, it’s much more important to look at the differences in participants’ experience and the perspectives that arise from those differences.
In reciprocal mentoring, the key question is ‘What partnerships have most potential for achieving organisational change?’
Good practice includes creating a profile of the ideal participants from higher and lower hierarchical levels in the organisation. These should include both positive characteristics and ‘red flags’ such as reluctant participants, especially at senior levels, who’ll just ‘go through the motions’ without truly engaging, and ‘blame-shifters’.
Positive characteristics in senior and junior employees might include:
- Openness and willingness to learn and be challenged
- A level of clarity about the value of diversity in achieving both organisational goals and their team goals
- Curiosity
- Willingness to challenge the status quo
- Ability to listen
4. Measurement and review
Asking participants for feedback on their relationship is useful in prompting them to reflect on and review how they’re working together. With reciprocal mentoring, it is especially important to check in with each pair to ensure they’re making progress and have built a relationship of mutual trust and creative exploration as the challenge of building a relationship of deep honesty and enquiry is so much greater. Both parties need to develop a high level of personal vulnerability and may need support in doing so.
Supervision has become more common in mentoring programmes to support mentors in developing their skills, bringing difficult issues for review and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of participants. In reciprocal mentoring, where the stakes are higher, the safeguarding issues give supervision an extra importance.
Supervision can be individual, in relationship pairs, or in larger groups. For practical reasons, including cost, issues should be raised first with the programme co-ordinator, who’ll then if needed refer the issue on to one or other form of supervision. Group supervision has the benefit that everyone learns for each other’s experience – and it’s cheapest. However, some issues may not be suitable to raise in a group environment.
5. High standard of ethics
It can be helpful to have a Statement of Ethics that defines the values underpinning both the initiative and the programme. This may be linked to the organisation’s vision and values and to any diversity and inclusion policy. A key component is informing participants how to recognise when an espoused organisational value is not being demonstrated in practice and clarifying the steps required to bring such conflicts into the open for discussion. Again, this is over and above what would happen in normal mentoring programmes,
6. Administration and support
Everyone in the programme should be clear about their roles and those of the programme manager and steering group. A project plan outlines what needs to be done, by whom and when – from preparation to final evaluation.
The steering group can be useful in many ways. In particular:
- Informal check-ins with every mentoring pair across the lifetime of the programme
- Identifying potential mentors and mentees
- Giving informal support to relationships that aren’t working out
- General support for the programme co-ordinator
Having an easily accessible library of background materials participants can turn to for guidance reduces the burden on the programme coordinator and makes it more likely that participants will seek to enhance their knowledge and skill.
Other issues
There are many small factors that influence the quality of these co-learning relationships. Among the most common:
- Where to meet Always an issue in terms of expression of relative power, but in reciprocal mentoring it’s especially important to choose a neutral venue. Even on virtual media, the backgrounds chosen can have a positive or negative influence! One option is to choose together a virtual background (say, a wood) that encourages reflection, or to alternate between scenes that reflect each other’s worlds.
- Programme duration The practical reality is that most organisations want to see some practical outcomes within six months. During this period the level of support will be relatively intense, but thereafter the relationships can become much less formal.
Changing systems
To have a wider systemic impact, each mentoring pair captures and shares themes they’ve derived from their discussions. Both parties also engage with their own peers to identify topics to explore within the relationship. They bring both of these sources of data to a series of all-pairs sessions, which explore ways to influence the system collectively.
Among issues to consider are:
- What are the experiences we share that illustrate systemic issues?
- What data do we not yet have, which would help define inequalities and bias in the system?
- What are the quick wins we should focus on?
- How can we make effective use of the different ‘lived experiences’ of working here?
- How can we identify and give ‘voice’ to those who need it but don’t have it?
- How can we create enough positive role models to make change stick?
- What needs to change in the language we use?
- Who isn’t included but should be and how will we make them part of the solution?
These sessions should be at least two hours in duration, to achieve sufficient depth. They need to be professionally facilitated or supervised, not least to ensure an appropriate level of psychological safety.
Key dos and don’ts include:
- Do establish clear ground rules of confidentiality
- Do provide an analysis of the themes well in advance of the session, so people have a chance to prepare
- Do appoint volunteers to lead discussions on each key topic
- Don’t over-structure the discussions but do ensure they feel purposeful
The passion that people feel about some issues is a powerful engine for change. It can also detract from the quality of listening by all parties. As preparation for these collective sessions, the co-learners can beneficially explore together how to channel passion into rational, outcomes-focused dialogue when the pairs come together.
Measurement and review
In standard mentoring arrangements, the impact of the individual relationships and the programme as a whole are relatively easy to measure. Outcomes for mentors and mentees fall into four categories: learning, career (What progress have they made?), enabling (Do they, for example, have a clearer sense of career and personal direction?), and emotional (What has changed in their self-esteem, sense of self efficacy, self-confidence?)
Outcomes for the organisation are typically built around programme objectives. With reciprocal mentoring, measurement is much more complex.
At a personal level, key measures will typically relate to:
- Specific and general learning relating to awareness of diversity, culture, power dynamics and how political systems in organisations work
- How participants have been able to apply those learnings to their own behaviour and work practices.
At an organisational level, we’re measuring impact on the system, evidenced by, for example:
- The number of issues identified and addressed
- Satisfaction by different groups with how those issues have been addressed
- Improvement in ‘good place to work’ ratings
- Psychological safety
- Employee engagement
A combination of hard and soft measures can be particularly powerful. So, for example, an issue identified in a large corporate was that many talented staff were reluctant to put themselves forward for promotion interviews, because they felt they were just a token presence. Co-mentoring pairs suggested a range of educational measures to ensure that this didn’t happen and designed several measures to assess panel interviews. Among the post-panel questions were:
- To what extent did you feel you belonged in the room?
- To what extent did the environment enable you to present yourself at your best?
About the author
- David Clutterbuck is a co-founder of the EMCC, and of Coaching and Mentoring International