Reverse Mentoring

Sometimes called mutual mentoring or upward mentoring, reverse mentoring has been used successfully in a variety of companies, including GE, Procter & Gamble, BT, BP and Accenture. It differs from peer mentoring in that the partners in the relationship are from different levels in the hierarchy - sometimes several levels apart - and from traditional mentoring in that it is the hierarchically more junior person who takes the primary mentoring role, although learning is still two-way.

The stimulus for upward mentoring has arisen from two main areas of concern. In diversity programmes, one of the limiting factors on progress of women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds has been the inability of top management to understand their issues. Even though they may have attended diversity awareness workshops, emotional commitment often only comes from seeing the issues through the eyes of someone who experiences them on a frequent basis.

The second area of concern has been the recognition that senior managers are often heavily out of touch with key areas such as new technology or customer concerns. That knowledge is usually held by people at relatively junior levels. Reverse mentoring provides a mechanism to bypass the normal communication channels, which tend to sanitise knowledge, and keep the executives informed about developments they may not normally be aware of.

In essence, reverse mentoring is therefore an opportunity for a reality check at the top of the organisation. The more junior (usually younger) employees have an opportunity to observe and learn from management thinking, to influence organisational policy and to become more at ease dealing with people of substantially greater hierarchical authority.

The benefits from reversing the mentoring roles are summarised in Table 7.

Table 7: The benefits of reverse mentoring

Benefits to the senior manager	Benefits to the more junior partner	Benefits to the organization
Understanding perspectives of other groups in the Organization - gender, age, culture A sounding-board on how new policies and/or strategies may be viewed from below Guidance on new and emerging technology ‘Friends in low places' A source of challenge to one's thinking	Visibility Access to senior management thinking A role model for own development Challenge to one's thinking Greater comfort in speaking with people in authority	Increased understanding and support for diversity management Enhanced leadership credibility Knowledge management Improved communication between layers in the organization Constructive challenge to company policy and practice

In practice, as with the case of BP below, reverse mentoring programmes tend to avoid the issue of who is mentor and who is mentee, preferring to concentrate on the mutual learning roles. However, the very strong emphasis on the learning goals of the executives indicates where the primary intention of the relationships lies.

Reverse mentoring is becoming more common, and companies are reporting significant benefits. A number of patterns are emerging.

In some cases the relationship follows the traditional mentoring pattern - face-to-face meetings, reflective approach - but with the junior person as mentor. One government department has used its fast-track entrants to mentor senior Civil Servants. The junior mentors received training in their roles, whereas preparation of the senior mentees was done on a one-to-one basis to establish development objectives for the relationship. Great care was taken in the matching process and in follow-up support.

Several companies are using the junior mentor more directly, involving them in meetings and activities where they can observe their partner and provide direct feedback on their performance.

One programme began through a more traditional route by offering shadowing opportunities to their high-potential staff. This developed into a shadow-mentoring programme where the shadowing opportunities were balanced with time to reflect with the senior partner in a mentoring relationship. However, participants began to find benefit in providing feedback in both directions.

Non-traditional mentoring relationships flourish where thought is given to the roles of each partner. Who is the ‘primary' learner? In most mentoring relationships both partners benefit, but for the mentor this is generally secondary learning and the focus is on the mentee. Will this still be the case? Because the mentor is now more junior there is often an assumption that there will continue to be direct learning for them from shared experience. All models are possible, but in setting up their relationship the pair need to be able to agree.

Being the ‘mentor' in a reverse mentoring relationship is not easy. In most cases, the more junior person will have little experience at leading a learning dialogue with someone so senior. An important part of the training process, therefore is to provide skills and some frameworks to structure discussions until they flow more easily.

Where the junior mentor is giving feedback on a real-time situation, we have found that a three-stage framework helps.

• Initially, a briefing dialogue enables the pair to look at the upcoming activity and agree the focus for feedback.

• A feedback dialogue allows for full exploration of the experience.

• A debrief dialogue looks at how the mentoring process worked and how it could be improved for future sessions.

The framework puts the junior mentor comfortably into the questioning role, allowing him or her to take the lead.

Mentors, too, need time to think through the relationship so that they accept and enjoy this reversal of roles. Although supportive of the concept, it is all too easy in the mentoring meeting to slip back into default mode and for the senior person to take the lead. Having a discussion framework that is understood by both parties gives the senior person confidence in the process, allowing him or her to participate freely and both to feel less threatened.

The case studies below illustrate the kind of approaches to reverse mentoring adopted by three organisations. The Procter & Gamble case is particularly interesting because it occurs in a traditional sponsoring mentoring environment in which hierarchy and status might have been expected to create a barrier to the learning relationship. The interest in peer and reverse mentoring is growing rapidly and these approaches are likely to become increasingly significant in the design of broad mentoring capability within large organisations.

Case studies

Case Study
The Cabinet Office

This case was first published in Mentoring in Action (Clutterbuck and Megginson, 1999). Leslie Martinson was at the time a Civil Servant in the Cabinet Office, with a role that demanded she obtain a good instinctive understanding of the world of training. Because this was not her core background, Leslie enrolled on a two-year advanced diploma programme for trainers, which encouraged participants to seek mentors. The mentor she chose was someone younger and in a grade below, but with very extensive training experience. Ignoring the status difference made for relaxed, often humorous but intense meetings, where Leslie was able to explore her progress towards becoming an effective trainer, plus a number of other personal development goals she had set for herself. The relationship survived changes of jobs on both sides, including one that took Leslie into the position of supervising her mentor's boss. The relationship dissolved as she completed the programme and both of them moved on to new fields.

Case Study
Procter & Gamble

A higher turnover among women in junior and middle management posts was one of the key triggers for the Mentoring Up programme introduced in P&G's marketing division a while ago. The traditional response to this kind of problem in mentoring terms is to institute a glass ceiling programme, under which senior executives (usually predominantly male) would adopt younger, more junior protégés and nurture their progress. In this case, however, the company was astute enough to recognise that this approach (which was considered) would simply reinforce the cultural aspects of the problem. These could only be addressed by creating an environment in which the male executives learned to understand the problems of diversity for themselves. The programme that resulted provided male managers with female mentors, usually more junior than themselves, whose role was to:

• provide them with informal, non-threatening feedback on how to manage issues specific to women

• act as a sounding-board.

At the same time, the programme allowed the women mentors to develop quality relationships with people at senior level and hence to become more visible within the organisation.

The results of the initiative include a remarkable improvement in the female staff retention problem.

Case Study
BP's Mutual Mentoring scheme

In 2001 BP piloted a unique upward diversity mentoring programme over eight months. Under the title of the ‘Mutual Mentoring' scheme, it linked 24 individuals in the organisation to others with whom they would not normally have interacted, enabling shared learning and new insights gained from the diverse positions that each individual held.

In the BP programme, early-career professionals act as mentors to senior leaders of the company. The pairings combine genders and cultural heritages, so that junior women mentor senior men, and there are pairs of different nationalities where possible. The mentoring pairs openly discuss issues such as diversity in their mentoring meetings, and senior managers are able to gain extensive insight into race, gender, age and culture issues to which they otherwise would not be exposed.

The Mutual Mentoring scheme has made an impact on the organisation through increased awareness of gender differences and better understanding of expectations at different levels and generations. It has also stimulated creativity and innovation within BP, as well as a better awareness of diversity and inclusion concepts. Such success in the UK has helped the scheme to expand to the USA and Europe - to highly positive reviews.