What no one told you about “Reverse Mentoring”
In previous blogs, we’ve told you all about mentoring and coaching, but have you heard of ‘reverse mentoring’? It isn’t a brand new concept and in fact, it’s been around for over a decade but it’s experiencing a rebirth in popularity.
Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company describes reverse mentoring: “It’s a situation where the old fogies in an organisation realise that by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, you’re not in touch with the future the same way the young twenty-something’s. They come with fresh eyes, open minds and instant links to the technology of our future.”
It is commonly thought that reverse mentoring takes place when a senior manager seeks help from a younger and more junior employee. In this situation, the elder mentee receives support from the tech savvy millennial, in order to become more comfortable with IT tools.
The concept of reverse mentoring is too often misinterpreted or misused. The objective of this article is to challenge the stereotypes out there and reveal the real advantages or disadvantages of reverse mentoring.
What’s good about reverse mentoring?
The rise of the reverse mentoring discourse unveiled the issues of traditional mentoring and created a space for debate. Organisations today are in urgent need for a non-linear, bi-directional exchange of information outside of the current corporate hierarchy. The professional services industry is requiring ever more highly specialised employees, who have to learn to share their expertise in order to achieve a common goal.
Equally, a positive culture of knowledge sharing and learning across different roles, departments and generations positively impacts innovation. In fact, by meeting new people from different experiences it is possible to share new ideas and help each other becoming more innovative, impacting the business’s bottom line.
What’s not so good about reverse mentoring?
Reverse mentoring has a very generalist nature. Our philosophy within the Talking Circles team lies with the principle that everyone in the company has something to teach and learn.
The same way that senior managers not only seek technical help, junior and younger employees have a lot more to offer than just IT support. It is unfair to restrict any kind of learning programme to what people think it should do.
An organisation’s stakeholders should be encouraged to extract and shout out everything they can offer regardless of their age and/or role in a company. If discourse precludes mentors from sharing their most valuable knowledge, then how can reverse mentoring ever be successful?
For any learning and development programme, including mentoring, there should be a clear vision and objective expressed and it also should fit the need of the modern workforce.
The focus should be shifted from the mere age of the two parts in the mentoring relationship to the inherit success of the relationship.
Our philosophy around career development and mentoring lies within the mindset that if one is looking for a mentor, age should not be a criteria — which is what the Reverse Mentoring discourse implies. Mentoring should be employed to broaden skill sets, consolidating knowledge and engage with a new point of view through a mutual learning experience.
Talking Circles is a peer-mentoring software that aims at building employees’ network within their company in order to foster knowledge sharing and positive workplace culture. As a result, we are able to improve company’s innovation and performance.
If you want to find out more, request more info here
By Mia Meroi, TC Marketing Team
