In 1994, Delphi Group—the company where we both ended up working and which we grew to an Inc. 500 global player with offices in the U.S., Canada, England, South America, and Asia—was still in start-up mode. The firm was
looking for a new hire to take over computer systems, which consisted of half a dozen Apple Macintoshes and DIY four-strand telephone lines running a proprietary AppleTalk network and e-mail system. This was before web browsers had come on the scene, when e-mail was mostly used inside companies but rarely between them, and the Internet was a curiosity for the vast majority of businesses.
The people we interviewed for the position were predominantly programmers from large companies that could afford to staff their computer operations. These candidates knew how to run mainframes or minicomputers and code in now long-forgotten languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN.
We would show them our small, strange Macintosh system and they would look at us as though we had just arrived from another planet. We had just about given up on finding someone to fill the position when a young twenty-something responded to our classified ad in the Boston Globe. He had blonde hair that grew to below his shoulders and a degree from the Berklee College of Music, and he played an awesome keyboard, none of which qualified him for the position. But he also knew what a Macintosh was and he seemed to have a passion for cutting- edge technology, including the then relatively new Internet.
Over the next decade, this young man not only built Delphi’s information systems to support its multinational business but became a reverse mentor to Delphi’s CEO. He was also the person nearly everyone in the company would go to in order to get a glimpse of how new technologies were changing behaviors.
In 2001, for example, he noticed the initial rise of a new category of companies that focused on facilitating social connections and he developed a close working relationship with one of the earliest, LinkedIn. At his urging Delphi ran one of the first events on the topic of Social Media, which at the time was considered by most people to be no more than a curiosity. Your authors—Dan, the mentor, and Tom, the mentored—are the “we” in this narrative, and that was our introduction to reverse mentoring. At the time, neither of us had the slightest idea that we were creating a model for mentoring that would be important to Delphi and our clients, or that it would be part of what we would one day call the Gen Z Effect. However, we were not alone.
At about the same time, Jack Welch at GE was putting in place a similar model to help himself and his senior execs familiarize themselves with the rapidly changing technology landscape of the Internet. Other companies such as The Hartford and Cisco would soon do the same.
However, less than 15 percent of the six hundred companies we surveyed for this book have a reverse mentoring program in place, even though 51 percent have cross-generational teams. What is especially interesting is that,
of the companies that have a reverse mentoring program in place, 94 percent also have traditional mentoring programs, even though only 56 percent of all companies have such programs. Clearly, while reverse mentoring may be an outlier, it is much more likely to exist in organizations that understand the benefits of mentoring. It’s an interesting twist on how we started our own journey down this path, since Delphi had—as one of its founding principles—a traditional mentoring program for every new hire.
The organizations we studied that had a reverse mentoring program in place were also among the more progressive ones in terms of their attitudes toward remote work, wage transparency, and less rigid or flat organizational structures, such as a Holacracies, which distribute decision making throughout teams rather than deriving decisions from the top of a hierarchy.
So what exactly is reverse mentoring, and how does it work?
Let’s start with the simple foundation of mentoring. Recall that almost half of the organizations we studied are unaccustomed to traditional mentoring, or have decided it is not a worthwhile use of resources. The notion of the mentor as a trusted advisor who helps guide a protégé and shares life experiences and acquired wisdom fits nicely into our traditional population pyramid. However, it also explains a bit about why mentoring is not as prevalent universally since the traditional population pyramid always has fewer potential mentors than protégés.
Although 56 percent of organizations may have a mentoring program in place, it is less often the case that individuals have the benefit of a dedicated mentor throughout their careers. Few of us are likely to be assigned a wise old counselor to help us learn the ropes. Those of us who do have mentors often meet them through professional relationships.
However we form them, mentoring relationships can be among the most valuable and meaningful professional and life relationships. The premise is simple: experienced individuals pass their know-how, successes, failures, and confidence on to less experienced individuals. But this is where many of the principles of the Gen Z Effect start to turn the tables.
In a traditional mentoring relationship, the mentor almost always picks or is assigned to the protégé for the express purpose of passing on knowledge and experience. The agreement is that the mentor will share what she knows for the benefit of the protégé, in exchange for the satisfaction of increasing the likelihood of her protégé’s success. In pop culture it’s called “paying it forward.”
However, for Gen Z, experience and influence don’t flow only from the top of the pyramid; it’s just as likely that knowledge and ideas will percolate up from the bottom. Over time, the Gen Z Effect creates a need for mentoring in both directions, up and down. That’s the basic premise behind reverse mentoring—
experiences change so rapidly that we have to look to those most comfortable and confident in their use of new technologies to help us keep up.
“Keeping up,” in the case of Gen Z, is as much about understanding the behavior and value of new technology as it is about using the technology. In fact, the technology is only getting simpler, it’s the behavior that is hardest to grasp—if it’s accepted at all.
We recall a Cisco meeting one of us attended where a group of young Millennials had been paired off with a larger group of Boomers to discuss the merits of new behaviors in social media. The Millennials represented an extraordinary group of individuals who Cisco had handpicked to help reverse mentor and pass on their perspectives to tenured employees and customers.
During a roundtable discussion, the Millennials were talking about the importance of transparency and openness in organizations. The focus was on how social media helps create a culture of sharing and open dialog, both inside the organization and with the marketplace. One of the Boomers attending was shocked by what he felt was a naïve attitude among Millennials about the risks and downside of such an extreme degree of openness. The back and forth and the level of irritation on the part of the Boomer illustrated just how difficult the process of reverse mentoring can be.
Unlike traditional mentoring, in which the mentor is always a senior individual who can pass on experience without much risk of pushback from the protégé, reverse mentoring provides no safe haven for the mentor, who can easily be trumped by the protégé’s position in the organizational hierarchy.
There are only two scenarios we have observed in which reverse mentoring stands a chance. The first is the model popularized by GE’s Welch, who issued a direct edict establishing the importance and value of reverse mentoring. Welch not only mandated that five hundred of his executives find a reverse mentor, he did so himself. The second scenario is one in which the protégé suspends her authority and seniority, accepts that her life experience is not a proxy for disproving the radically different experiences of her mentor, and puts up with the level of discomfort required to gain a new, and likely very disruptive, perspective.
The best way to think of reverse mentoring is in terms of how it differs from the objectives of traditional top-down mentoring. While traditional mentoring is often accepted as a natural and valuable way for an experienced and older individual to share her knowledge, the same is not true of reverse mentoring, which might be considered a poor use of a new or younger employee’s time. In fact, unless the mentored colleague is the young mentor’s boss, it’s probably the boss who will have the biggest problem with the distraction it causes the young
employee.