Reverse Mentoring – 3 Ways to Create a Reverse Mentorship in Your Company

Recently I wrote an article on my website about reverse mentoring and I often speak about this in my presentations and I often have clients ask me to further explain. Let me share with you the three components of reverse mentoring.

Reverse mentoring is actually receiving mentorship from someone that is not at the same level as you. This is counter to what we would hear about peer mentoring or about mentoring in general.

Reverse mentoring is actually where someone has a skill set that you do not have regardless of your experience and success. One of the organizations I have worked with as a consultant has many people who I would consider a Gen-Y. Gen-Y’s are those in their 20’s. What they realized is that their Gen-Y’s had a large level of technological knowledge. A lot of their experienced long-term employees had adequate technological knowledge but certainly not the knowledge that the Gen-Y’s had and so the strategy we came up with was to implement reverse mentoring. What we did was we paired a Gen-Y with a very experienced what we would call a baby-boomer or if you prefer a Zoomer which is a baby-boomer who refuses to age. We would pair the Gen-Y with the Zoomer and we would ask the Gen-Y to mentor the Zoomer around technology. Well, fascinating things began to happen. Simply by pairing the Gen-Y with the Zoomer, the Zoomer was understanding technology faster and being able to get up to speed to use the technology to move forward which was of huge profitability and excitement for the company leaders as you can imagine. The other part of that reverse mentoring was the Zoomer would then turn around and reverse mentor the Gen-Y on things like company history, the reasons why they did the processes the way the did, on protocol. So each of the areas that each group was very proficient at they shared that with the other person, which is what I call reverse mentoring.

The three things that make reverse mentoring very successful:

You have to set it up so that it is a win-win and it is an interesting dynamic because just by sheer age it could create a little bit of tension where the Zoomer feels, “Well I have been around longer therefore I know more,” and where the Gen-Y might feel intimidated by that Zoomer. So you want to create a sense of safety and a sense of sharing and a sense of peer when you have reverse mentoring systems in place. How it is set up is very crucial to its success.
You need to have leadership buy-in to the process. So upper management, upper leadership, all the way to the executive level needs to be participating in the process.

One of the pharmaceutical companies I worked for did this and he was amazed that the CEO was interacting with a Gen-Y from the intake level and the Gen-Y was coming to the CEO with technological knowledge and the CEO was just absolutely amazed at what he didn’t know about the technology of his own company. In fact, the CEO blogged about it on his CEO blog and the Gen-Y got a little bit of fame within the organization which was a beautiful byproduct of that arrangement. So you want to make sure that senior management buys into it and of course because the CEO had blogged about it everyone who was participating in the program became more engaged and enamored with the process.
You want to report the success. If you just have the reverse mentoring and individuals are having success they will talk about it but you want to be able to report and communicate the success to the company overall. You want to put examples in the company newsletter, you want to provide success stories in the company intranet, you want to make it look and appear to everyone that this program is increasing knowledge sharing, it is increasing mentorship, and it is increasing the success of the organization and the growth.

So there you go. The three things that you need to make sure of in reverse mentoring. First of all you need to be open to it and I am hoping that you are after hearing this bit