5 Benefits of Reverse Mentoring
What is Reverse Mentoring?
In the previous article we talked about mentoring and its benefits for mentees, mentors, and organizations, and we introduced the term “reverse mentoring”. While mentoring refers to the standard relationship where people with greater experience help others who are in the earlier of their career succeed through the sharing of experiences and perspectives, reverse mentoring recognizes that in a world of emerging young technologies and a consumer base mainly consisted of Millennials and Generation Z, the younger and less-experienced individuals in an organization may have valuable insights that can actually benefit experienced senior leaders with their decision-making.
Reverse mentoring is designed to empower younger talented employees to share their opinion, feedback, and expertise with senior employees. It does not necessarily place entry-level employees into positions of power, but it is meant to help organizations deploy and consider opinions from younger employees on how processes could be established differently in more sustainable/optimized ways. Such thing, benefits companies and helps them foster an environment of growth and learning overall.
Improving retention rates and deploying initiatives to keep younger employees – aka Millennials and Generation Z – has turned out to be a key strategy for most organizations today. In fact, studies from Deloitte show that 43% of Millennials (the largest generation currently in the labor force) plan to leave their jobs in the next two years.
To retain those talents and to stay relevant to younger consumers, companies are implementing reverse-mentoring programs. This approach was first introduced back in 1990s from Jack Welch (ex-Chairman and CEO for GE) to teach senior executives on how to use internet. However, today such programs go far beyond only focusing on technologies. Reverse mentoring today focuses on strategic issues, leadership, diversity issues and even working mindset.
Benefits of Reverse Mentoring
Leading a Learning Culture – In every mentorship program, there is always something to learn from both parties. Reverse mentoring gives the opportunity to senior leaders to listen to feedback and learn from more junior employees. At the same time, younger employees get to work alongside people who have a lot of experience and advice to share. That said, both mentor and mentee learn from each other and help each other become a better version of themselves. By having such program in place, you help building a culture where people seek for the advice of each other when facing difficult situations, thus minimizing the risks of having low-performers and/or failing on certain projects.
Retaining Millennials and Generation Z – Employees from these two generations ask mostly for growth opportunities and transparency within an organization. A Reverse-mentoring program can satisfy both these needs. Participating in the advisory board to have a voice and share your opinion, and/or work closely with a senior employee, automatically means that you are involved in many discussions that affect the long-term strategy of your organization. Young employees, as the mentors in such situations get to spend a lot of time with more senior leaders, and even though their purpose is to share with them their feedback and expertise, they get to learn from those more experienced people as well by observing their behavior when it comes to decision-making.
Empowering Emerging Leaders – Reverse mentoring is a highly effective way of developing leadership skills in younger employees. Having the additional responsibility of mentoring others, younger employees get the opportunity to improve their communication skills, practice empathy, learn to ask the right questions, accept refusal, and become more self-aware when it comes to their own performing potential. Working closely with senior colleagues can help them grow a role model figure for their own leadership roles in the future.
Mastering Digital Skills – Even though I believe that the focus of reverse -mentoring programs should not be solely teaching digital skills to senior leadership, it has be proven that such programs help senior employees learn new skills much faster and better than if they would study them separately. It is well-known that 70% of everything we learn in our life comes from being part of the experience ourselves. As such, young employees, the latest digital-savvy generation can play a critical role in upskilling your more senior employees fast, efficiently and without additional costs for the organization.
Driving with Diversity – Young generations include a wide range of gender and ethnic diversity; Something that has not been seen before at such level. With reverse-mentoring programs you can build inclusive relationships that do not take into consideration age, ethnicity or gender. Such inclusion can lead into a broader mass of insights for senior leadership. In return, they will start to understand the difficulties that these (usually) minority groups face and therefore, they will quickly start acting.
Thank you for reading so far! I hope you found this article useful. Let us know in the comments below what you think about Reverse Mentoring and/or if you have already implemented such program in your company.
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