Flipping the script: Why reverse mentoring matters

Traditional mentoring models often focus on senior professionals guiding juniors, but what if the roles were flipped? An appreciation and observation of real, commercial benefits from reverse mentoring.

Teamwork: Let’s start with the inevitable growth of non-traditional teams. We’re all on the digitalisation journey – still with a long way to go for most (if anyone tells you they’re way down the track with digitalisation, don’t believe them!). That journey requires non-traditional teams – getting away from the trickle-down hierarchy and putting together ‘communities of use’. These steering communities are just as much a research group as a guiding committee, so need to have representation right through the organisation. Reverse mentoring relationships dovetail neatly into this idea of non-traditional, collaborative teams.

Talent: Then there’s the subject of assisting retention. I actually think this works both ways. Reverse mentoring is designed to achieve a state of mutual respect. It’s not just us younger people telling the older people that they’ve got it all wrong and don’t understand! Yet having a concrete communications channel open between more junior and more senior people gives both parties a greater sense of connection and the ability – at least somewhat – to influence each others’ thinking. Aspiring employees are therefore more connected to senior cultures. Seniors are more connected to their people’s daily life experience and frankly become more confident in their own leadership as a result. I also think there’s a benefit from reverse mentoring helping to forge better inter-departmental links, if they are consciously set up that way, overcoming silos (and resentments between them).

One of the best things about reverse mentoring is the ability to break down invisible walls that often separate generations in the workplace, paving the way for better understanding and collaboration. Learning becomes a two-way street, creating an environment where curiosity is celebrated. From a personal perspective, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my mentee, and had the pleasure of attending some of his team meetings to observe his leadership style. It was a mutually beneficial process: he gained tips and feedback to enhance his leadership style, and I got more visibility and understanding of how the business works.

Louise Cook, Marketing Lead at Siemens Electrification and Automation

Insight and subject understanding would be my next theme. Jack Welch thought his seniors just didn’t understand what the emerging online world was all about and needed their juniors to coach them. I think this still remains the case today. The number of times I see a senior colleague suddenly discover a digital tool or platform and get naively over-enthusiastic about it, until a worldly-wise junior tells them how the tool is over-promoted and under-performs. You would have thought that we should all now know there are no ‘silver bullets’. At the same time, junior staff can benefit from senior interaction to get a better framework of understanding about the business: a framework for achieving technical understand; context that helps them understand the business’s commercial priorities and drivers; fast-tracking a set of priorities for how they should build their business skills. And then the junior partner often acts as ambassador for those elements of senior guidance throughout their cohort.

Culture: Reverse mentoring is also designed to build a culture of trust and transparency. This can be achieved by assigning the pairing of a common or shared project – something like an initiative to improve inter-departmental communication and collaboration, for instance. It should not be plucked out of the ether, but carefully selected so that both parties have a genuine interest in its outcomes. For the senior, undergoing leadership development, the project might be designed to enhance a key skills gap. For the junior, it might have developmental value by asking us to provide company feedback and intelligent challenge – a platform to develop our own connections within the business, as well as our knowledge of interests and motivations of each department we talk to. I’ve found this can really be a confidence builder – knowing that your feedback is having real influence. One major caveat though, is that such projects should work hard to avoid the idea that we – as the junior parties – are being favoritised in the business – something bound to cause resentments and possibly impede our growth and progress in the company.

Reverse mentoring has been one of our key global initiatives. 
We consulted colleagues who had already taken part in such programmes to understand their value, pitfalls and successes. Then we launched a six-month pilot. When we called for participants, we expected to get maybe twenty, but got over sixty!

The pilot feedback has been really positive, with challenges along the way overcome through either group workshop sharing or individual support, especially finding mutually beneficial topics.

If there were two key outcomes, I would say they wereⁱ opening both parties to new perspectives, andⁱⁱ instilling confidence – both for the less experienced participant when mentoring ‘upward’ and for the more experienced colleague when interacting more meaningfully with less experienced cohorts.

Emma Thomas, Change and Culture Facilitator, Siemens Financial Services

Reciprocal skills: Where the junior party in reverse mentoring continues to educate their seniors about digital skills, the senior party can also reciprocate with guidance over soft skills and communication techniques. In a world where much has moved online and remote, those of us who grew up with just landline telephones and a postal service are often more adept at face-to-face and the subtleties of people management. Yet this is not a simple affair. To usefully support the junior partner, the senior has to really listen and learn about the interpersonal dynamics which drive, motivate and influence the junior group. The reverse mentor pairing has to mutually achieve what I would call a ‘cultural closeness’ – understanding how each other speaks and thinks, their pressures, their aspirations. Otherwise the senior’s wisdom is stuck in the past, rather than reflecting on modern day realities.

Promoting diversity is also a major benefit of reverse mentoring. I already serve on various internal inclusivity initiatives and the reverse mentoring arrangements provides another channel for these issues from us to senior management. There remains some yawning gaps at the most senior levels of business still. Only ten of the FTSE top 100 companies are led by a female CEO, none of them a woman of colour. As our Sales Director Jo Harris has poignantly said, “I try my hardest to be available as a role model for women coming up through our organisation – whether specifically SFS or across the whole Siemens corporation. But what about for people like me? Where do I look? Where can I find a role model who matches my profile for being a successful senior sales director while also having managed and brought up a family?” All the more reason, then, to implement connections up and down the ranks of seniority now to ensure that in the future, people like Jo don’t have such frustrations.

I started the reverse mentoring process somewhat sceptical, but we quickly grew together into finding value from the process. It rapidly became clear to us that it wasn’t so much about content, but rather about style, presentation, interaction.

My mentor is very outspoken, honest, uninhibited, but always positive – critical but always constructive. It’s true that the higher you rise in an organisation, the less likely you are to receive open feedback. So our conversations were totally refreshing. We discovered new ways, better ways to do things, to communicate. I ended up asking her to sit in on some of my management meetings and give feedback afterwards. I gained really useful insights into how to interact more effectively – even which order to include/rotate people’s input in meetings and agendas.

Overall, she’s encouraged me to show more of the person behind the leader – something we continue to experiment with – with varying feedback!

The exercise was so good, and so valuable, I asked to continue.

Hubert Borsboom, Global Chief Risk Officer, Siemens Financial Services – Commercial Finance

Prejudice: While reverse mentoring clearly supports generational inclusivity, encouraging (intelligent) feedback up and down hierarchies, it also helps to challenge the last ‘acceptable’ form of prejudice – ageism. Less senior employees are not necessarily always younger. Often older people are working for younger managers. And there is a danger that the younger management think it acceptable (or even good commercial practice) to discriminate in favour of youth. Prejudice works both ways, often to the detriment of available experience which may not be the province of the young. While we want to capture the voice and experience of younger generations, we don’t want to lose the wisdom and insight of older people too. Mutual respect and understanding means exactly that.

We shouldn’t forget the general benefit of increasing employee engagement that should result from reverse mentoring. By having a line into senior management, I certainly feel more engaged in the business, its aims and objectives. I feel I have a voice that can truly influence change – inputs that are valued. It makes me feel on board – not as a passenger, but as one of the drivers.

According to the BBC, “Low engagement in the workplace is one of the reasons… research shows one in five US millennials changed jobs in the past year – three times as often as other generations . A study from 2021 tells us that software developers who taking part in a reverse mentoring scheme experienced a number of positive outcomes including feeling of greater engagement and as well as measurable performance benefits . It may also be noteworthy that as highly engaged employees, we are also usually healthier. As a result, we take fewer days off and tend to experience lower stress levels. Employee retention and productivity are not just business ‘nice-to-haves’ – they are hard positives.

Leadership: Finally, I want to emphasize the importance of developing future leaders. By bringing understanding, appreciation and respect between junior and senior staff, a clearer and more credible path to the top is opened up. The truly ambitious will gain a better understanding of what it takes to get there, and the skills they need to develop. But also those who see the stresses and strains of senior management may equally choose not to take them on board, if that doesn’t fit their personality or life/career view. 

Both choices are equally valid. For the senior manager, understanding the aspirations, inclinations and outlook of junior colleagues helps to guide their (and their cohort’s) path to future advancement in ways that are simply more likely to succeed. 

In our view, the reverse mentoring exercise always delivers benefits that make it worth the investment of time and effort. Framing expectations – those of the junior and the senior participant – are a great starting point. Such framing guides the process, and gives it direction, although we find it’s best to keep an open mind as to where the conversations might unexpectedly lead.

Reverse mentoring is not the herald of a completely flattened management structure in business. Even though it does point towards non-traditional teams and a more collaborative (often more efficient and effective) way of working. Hierarchies and management echelons will still exist, but they must become more integrated – between management layers, between age groups, between majority and minority groupings, and so on. This is a route to creating clear, attractive and inclusive career paths for the budding senior managers of the future.

In short, the technique is already proving crucial to the development of organisations into collaborative teams that harness all available skills, help us get to know each other’s strengths and motivations, and foster an atmosphere of mutual respect.