Mentoring is when a more experienced person guides a younger or less experienced person – in the workplace, you’ll usually see an older or more senior employee showing a younger, often junior employee the ropes.
Reverse mentoring puts a new spin on traditional mentoring by recognising that skill gaps can exist across all organisation levels regardless of experience and age. This makes room for personal and professional development beyond the typical expectations that come with mentoring, according to conventional employee demographics.
Keen to find out more? Let’s explore reverse mentorship in terms of its benefits, common examples, implementation best practices as well as considerations to take into account before launching your next reverse mentoring programme.
What is reverse mentoring?
Reverse mentoring is a leadership development process involving a senior employee learning from a junior colleague in a formal work setting. It was started as a senior management internet learning initiative back in 1999 by Jack Welch, who was General Electric’s CEO at the time.
Reverse mentoring can be especially effective in remote work environments, where digital accessibility and inclusivity are essential. As more companies embrace remote work, the unique challenges and opportunities it presents are shaping how mentoring relationships are formed and sustained.
How is reverse mentoring different from traditional mentoring?
Traditional mentoring usually involves pairing senior employees with a junior colleague, with the intention of having the less experienced or younger person learn from the more experienced or older person. Reverse mentorship differs by having the senior colleagues do the learning instead.
What can reverse mentoring help to achieve?
As a concept, reverse mentoring encourages professional relationships that bypass rank and seniority – this lets participants focus on exchanging knowledge, experience and specific skills that they might otherwise not have.
The bottom-up flow of information in reverse mentorship acknowledges that junior colleagues have experience, expertise and perspectives to contribute even as early career employees.
Reverse mentoring can also help to bring a multigenerational workforce together and achieve intergenerational awareness, which is especially important as we now have four generations of employees across nearly 70 years of experience in the workplace.
Technological, cultural and professional developments in the past century mean that an employee in their 60s would experience life very differently from an employee in their 20s – reverse mentoring starts the conversation on generational nuances and cultural shifts such as diversity and inclusion.
In certain situations, reverse mentoring even helps senior management stay in the loop on what happens on the ground when they are paired with new hires and younger colleagues, allowing for a better understanding of what is happening within an organisation throughout the employment lifecycle.
What are the benefits of a reverse mentoring relationship?
Reverse mentoring relationships have a host of advantages for both sides of the equation.
For mentees (senior leaders)
Building a constructive workplace culture is one of the most difficult aspects of leadership. Getting in touch with junior colleagues as mentors is an effective way to build trust and transparency within the organisation, as both sides learn to communicate and understand each other better despite generational differences in tone and delivery.
Reverse mentoring relationships also support generational inclusivity at the workplace, as employees are often subject to stereotypical assumptions and ageism that goes both ways.
While younger colleagues are frequently seen as being too young for management roles, older employees are dismissed as obsolete and too old to keep up with technological developments. Connecting older and younger team members upends these assumptions and breathes new life into your organisation’s talent pool.
Moreover, incorporating regular retrospective meetings into the reverse mentoring process can be invaluable. Agile retrospective meetings, for instance, offer a structured way to reflect on progress, identify areas of improvement, and ensure continuous learning and development in the mentoring relationship.
Trading knowledge, skills and perspectives through reverse mentorship benefits senior mentees in two ways: first, it encourages a learning culture within the organisation, which facilitates innovation at work. Secondly, it also equips older employees with the digital skills they need to remain competitive, granting them confidence in engaging with new challenges.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a growing priority for younger employees, as it is important to feel represented, seen and heard at the workplace. Reverse mentoring relationships can help with DEI goals by pairing senior executives with culturally diverse junior colleagues, providing mentees with added perspective of how their work experiences differ across demographics.
When mentees are confronted with the lack of diversity and inclusivity at the senior management level, this disparity becomes much more apparent and informs organisational decision making with new perspectives.
For mentors (junior employees)
Mentees aren’t the only ones benefiting from reverse mentoring relationships – there is plenty in store for the junior employees who are doing the mentoring.
In general, reverse mentoring boosts employee retention rates within junior roles. Part of this is due to employee engagement, as reverse mentoring programmes bring junior colleagues and senior team members together for valuable face-to-face time. This helps junior team members with their careers as they don’t just feel heard and supported, but also get to demonstrate their abilities at work.
Junior employee mentors are also more likely to stick around after joining a reverse mentoring programme as the relationships built during the experience extend past the time spent in a mentor-mentee relationship.
While the senior leader mentee and the junior employee mentor remain so throughout the programme, it’s common for the junior colleague to receive coaching after the programme is completed, granting them opportunities for training, skills development and networking.
Reverse mentoring relationships further benefit junior mentors by facilitating cultural change and inclusivity.
When mentors from underrepresented demographics are paired with senior mentees, the cultural exchange involved often contributes to organisational cultural competency, helping senior leadership create a workplace that champions diversity.
Examples of reverse mentoring at work
We already know what traditional mentoring relationships look like – how does reverse mentoring look in comparison?
Example 1
John is a C-level executive who often speaks with senior management as part of organisation strategy. He has identified that marketing strategy diversification with a focus on digital marketing is necessary to further grow the business, but he is relatively unfamiliar with social media and other digital marketing strategies.
He develops a reverse mentoring partnership with his company’s newly hired digital marketing manager Anna, to better understand what it takes to build an organisation’s digital presence.
John learns how to better implement digital marketing strategy within the context of strategic planning, while Anna gets the chance to build a valuable relationship with upper management.
Example 2
Richard is a high level manager in the tech industry looking to enact diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at his company. While he has done his research on what to do next, he believes that he has a gap in his understanding that will affect how effective his policies are at encouraging cultural change.
He speaks with Alison about how her experiences as an Asian woman in programming has shaped her career.
Richard gains fresh perspectives about the unique challenges faced by Alison and uses his improved understanding to refine his DEI policy approach, while Alison feels heard after highlighting the challenges that come with her identity and culture and seeing how the new policy appropriately targets cultural changes relevant to her.
How can companies implement a reverse mentoring programme in the workplace?
To make the most out of your reverse mentoring programme, take these steps in order.
Step 1: Plan your reverse mentoring programme
Reverse mentoring is a great tool that can fulfil many objectives – thinking about what you’d like to improve on will help you refine and focus your objectives. Your organisation could be working on improving digital knowledge and skills, improving culture and perspectives, increasing millennial retention, or succession planning.
From there, define measurable criteria and processes for registration and matching, the length of the programme, expectations for mentors and mentees, metrics for monitoring and tracking progress, as well as participant selection methods.
Step 2: Promote the reverse mentoring programme and bring in participants
Once you’re ready, spread the word about your exciting new initiative and make it known that you’re recruiting participants. There are plenty of ways to do this, but using existing communication channels like email, internal newsletters, community channels or employee engagement software can make it easier.
Step 3: Match mentors and mentees
Now that you have a pool of participants, identify their skill sets, learning styles, personality traits, common interests and desired improvement areas. Information like this will help you determine who might be a good match while you prioritise the senior-junior dynamic reversal that is essential to the reverse mentoring process.
Depending on whether your reverse mentoring programme is invite-only or open to all, you may need to spend some extra time working on mentor-mentee relationship pairings. Take note of unconscious bias or favouritism that may influence your choices – having several people involved in pairing assignments can help mitigate this.
Step 4: Launch the reverse mentoring programme and track metrics
Equip your mentors and mentees with the resources they’ll need throughout the programme, and you’re ready to go. While your reverse mentoring programme is running, data points like meeting frequencies and participant feedback surveys will help you determine whether the initiative’s objectives are on track. This information can also help you figure out how to improve further next time.
Why do reverse mentoring relationships fail?
While reverse mentoring itself is a great scheme that brings success when implemented well, it does have its challenges. Some common ones include:
- Timing constraints for programme scheduling requirements
- Lack of resources to support the programme
- Insufficient mentees with the appropriate skill set
- Lack of support from senior leadership
- Information confidentiality concerns
Reverse mentoring doesn’t have to be an initiative on its own, as that can be intimidating to first timers – it can also be used in tandem with employee learning programmes or reward and recognition programmes to piggyback on the structure and incentives already in place.
Having a preliminary training session before running such a programme can further ensure the success of these partnerships. Sensitively pairing junior colleagues with executive mentees and vetting participants to prevent unconscious role reversion will also help reduce friction in reverse mentoring.
What are some success stories of reverse mentoring in today’s workplace?
At General Electric in the 90s, former CEO Jack Welch identified that he lacked the technology skills he would need to keep up with the future of energy, such as the internet. He believed that younger workers were more knowledgeable about these developments and could provide their higher-ups with the expertise they needed to remain competitive.
Since then, GE has carried on the practice to great success in intergenerational learning.
BNY Mellon’s Pershing also benefited from reverse mentoring, recording a 97% retention rate of their millennial workforce after implementing a reverse mentoring programme.
They found that millennials were uninterested in working in financial services, leading to high employee churn rates. Pairing junior colleagues with leadership teams helped them identify what younger employees wanted out of work, informing decisions on how to stay relevant to the new generation and retain top talent.
Embracing generational differences at work
Reverse mentoring can be a valuable organisational strategy tool that helps employees broaden their perspectives and develop leadership skills. Many companies already employ multiple generations – chances are, your business does, too.
Embracing generational differences at work fosters an inclusive and diverse work environment that encourages communication and breaks down harmful stereotypes.
Now that you’re armed with all these knowledge and tips, you can get started with facilitating reverse mentoring relationships within your organisation!
