Everyone Listening, Everyone Learning
By Joseph Stitt , Communications Specialist
Reverse Mentorship
Reverse mentorship—with younger employees serving as mentors to more experienced colleagues rather than the other way around—has been around since Jack Welch introduced the idea to help General Electric executives “learn about the internet.”
The rationale for reverse mentorship has varied, from increasing understanding of social media to gaining insight into evolving consumer needs, but they have one thing in common...
Reverse mentorship, like traditional mentorship, is about listening. Reverse mentorship’s innovation was to change who was doing the listening in terms of age and experience.
In internal communications, organizational knowledge usually flows down the organizational chart. Reverse mentorship makes it easier for knowledge to climb up as well as flow down.
An even more promising approach to improving listening, and improving communications organization-wide, is mutual mentorship.
Mutual Mentorship
The best reverse mentorship programs recognize that communication shouldn’t be all upstream. None of them assume the senior colleague will be doing all the listening.
But a big part of communicating well is about giving things their best names. “Mutual mentorship” makes it clear from the start that everyone will be both listening and being heard.
Colleagues with years of experience need to understand that their accumulated knowledge is valued and worth sharing. More recent arrivals need to understand that they can bring new insights, experiences, and skillsets to bear.
What mutual mentorship deemphasizes is just as important. Working toward common goals can be difficult in an online world teeming with memes and listicles about generational conflict between Boomers, Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z.
A culture of mutual listening makes working well together much easier to bring about.
Integrated Mentorship
If data collection is integrated into a mutual-mentorship program’s design, the program can generate useful information about the varying ways that different participants use language, images, and technology. Especially if the right questions are being asked:
What is being misunderstood about who we are and what we do?
What kinds of messages are we trying to send—about compensation and benefits, about our culture, about our mission and values—that aren’t breaking through?
Do we have means of communication (email, intranet, virtual meeting platforms) that need to serve people of differing backgrounds better?
Where could we rethink language and images to communicate more clearly and powerfully with particular audiences?
Is there a message our listeners especially need to hear that we haven’t said out loud?
This won’t always lead to easy answers, because working through different perspectives about language and technology can be challenging, but it becomes much more manageable in an organization where every member is encouraged to be both a mentor and a listener.
At Smith, we can help you think through these questions to find solutions best suited to your organization. Employee communication is what we do.
Sources
2022 BBC ARTICLE: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20221110-reverse-mentorship-how-young-workers-are-teaching-bosses
2013 REPORT ON PROGRAM AT THE HARTFORD: file:///C:/Users/user1/Downloads/PDF%20datastream.pdf?
AIHR 2025 ARTICLE: https://www.aihr.com/blog/reverse-mentoring/