Reverse Mentoring is where instead of you having a mentor that is senior to you, you get one that is 'junior' to you. This is unconventional and not something that I have come across often but one I have seen in the company I work for and have heard positive things on.
The reason you would have a traditional mentor, i.e. someone senior to you, is because you want to use their experience to help you in the situations you find yourself in. They would guide you and be able to enlighten you on areas that you feel you need strengthening.
Reverse mentoring works with that same principle in mind and I can think of two areas that it would be really useful in:
- To understand a point of view from a minority. For example imagine you are a white individual in a senior position of a large company and you do not have enough ethnically diverse representation in senior levels of the organisation. This is an ideal opportunity to have a reverse mentoring relationship with an ethnically diverse colleague. They could help you understand their viewpoint and the challenges they may come across in their position. Building up that relationship should help the senior manager to empathise with the colleague and come up with clear strategies to help those colleagues prosper.
- The other situation I think it would be useful to use reverse mentoring is where you are in a position that you have not found yourself in before so you want an independent view. For example, if you were line managing a team for the first time, you would be learning on the job but it may be uselful to have a reverse mentoring relationship with someone that isn't in your team but they are at the same grade/level as the people you are managing. You can then talk to them about the way you are approaching situations to get their view as a colleague that could be your direct report.
I am sure there are other useful situations where reverse mentoring would be beneficial so let me know where you have seen it used and what you think of it!
Mentoring is something I have written about recently and it is such a big topic I have had to split it over a few posts. Below are the previous two articles I have written on mentoring.
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Thanks for reading,
Gav
