Senior executives with years of experience have valuable advice for junior employees – but their decades-younger colleagues also have lots to teach their higher-ups, too. That's the idea behind ‘reverse mentoring’, a technique first developed in the 1990s to share technology skills. Now, in the pandemic era, the practice has fresh potential to help companies overcome the new challenges of hybrid working, diversity and inclusion, and unpick stereotypes that underpin generational divides.
Think about reverse mentorship as flipping traditional mentoring on its head: instead of senior staff supporting lower-level employees in their careers, younger generations help teach their managers about everything from consumer desires and TikTok to changing attitudes around social issues and equality.
“You’re sharing experiences, offering guidance and giving advice,” says Jennifer Jordan, professor of leadership and organisational culture at the Institute for Management Development, Switzerland. There are myriad potential benefits of reverse mentorship, from sparking innovation and boosting retention of younger workers, to helping employees decades apart better understand each other. And it’s relatively easy for companies to adopt alongside existing mentoring programs. This can explain why the concept is gaining steam in the current world of work – and may be poised to expand even more.
What is reverse mentoring?
Reverse mentoring pairs staff across generational divides, encouraging a bottom-up flow of information, alongside the traditional top-down approach. "Reverse mentoring is when we shift those roles and the senior person has something they can learn from the junior person," says Jim Berry, director of the MBA program at University College London.
The reversed approach can take the form of a one-way mentorship, with junior staff teaching specific skills or sharing information upwards, or it can be part of traditional mentorship structures, with both parties seeking to learn from each other. Another tactic is reverse mentoring events, when companies bring junior employees together as a group to meet leadership teams for one-off discussions.