Reverse Mentoring Programme

Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest issue of People, Planet, Partners.

Continuing on from last month’s look at the social value aspect of sustainability, I’d like to talk about a really exciting initiative here at Paragon: our Reverse Mentoring Programme (RMP).

We’ve flipped the traditional format of a business mentoring scheme and created a channel to reveal the challenges faced by people from diverse backgrounds to those at the highest levels in our business. Our objective is to generate awareness and understanding from the Board down, and drive change where it is needed.

Diverse Voices

For our programme, we paired up members of our senior leadership team with a mentor from a minority group, with the aim of giving them an alternative perspective on our business, including our strategy and culture, and to share the unique challenges faced by these groups in society. Often it's the aspects of diversity which can be seen which are focused on, like gender, ethnicity and age. In order for us to be truly inclusive, we must also account for all aspects of diversity which cannot be seen.

Our mentors covered a wide demographic, from colleagues with (dis)abilities and lower socio-economic circumstances; different sexualities and genders; parental status or care responsibilities; and diverse educations, to those from a broad range of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. We wanted to ensure that the diverse voices within our organisation were heard.

The Driving Forces

But how did the RMP get started? I spoke to Kathy Briggs, a Senior Account Director for one of Paragon Workplace Solutions' strategic clients, and one of the driving forces behind the programme, who told me:

“I’ve been fortunate to have managed many people in my career, listened to them, and heard their experiences. I’ve been able to develop an empathy for others and recognise we are all unique individuals and there is great value to having that diversity of experience and thinking. Working in asset management and investment banking for over 30 years, I’ve heard some horror stories and witnessed shocking behaviour. Things have certainly improved...but they haven’t disappeared – bias and discrimination exist, it’s just more subtle than 20 years ago.

Representation and visibility are so important. I wanted to give minorities a platform and to help my fellow senior leaders benefit in the way I have, and nurture an understanding of other people's experiences to develop their own empathy for others.

I’m part of Paragon’s Diversity and Inclusion Forum and one of my fellow members, Smita Poojary, had taken part in a similar programme during her university course. Together we started to work on the idea for a programme and its framework, and plan how we would roll it out across the organisation and built a business case that we could take to the Board.

Their reaction was amazing. We originally hoped to have 10 pairings, but at that meeting I realised I’d underestimated them. There was a sincere desire to change and to be better. They all wanted to take part and recommended we open the programme up to other senior leaders too. We ended up with 30 pairings, who held one-hour mentoring sessions once a month for six months.”

A Mentor’s View

Alison Jackson, Paragon Customer Communications' HR Director, was involved with the RMP from the start, and took part as one of the mentors:

“We wanted volunteer mentors, so we created an application form and sent it out to all our staff. We looked through all the applications and then started to pair people together, based on which senior leader we thought would match well with each mentor.

The team then created a six-month programme with topics for the pairings to discuss once a month, the first one being a “getting to know…” session, and developing into more specific topics from there. Because the programme involved people from across the whole business, each person had different levels of experience with this kind of thing – some hadn’t used Teams before. There was lots of nervousness at first.

It was really interesting watching them move from being quite nervous and unsure of themselves, then getting familiar with their mentees, to them finally sharing their insights. The mentors were evolving with the process and their confidence was growing. I think eventually they realised that our senior leadership team are all just people at the end of the day.

And for the mentees it landed in a really positive way. It made them question things in more depth. Does it have to be this way? Can we do things differently? I know for a fact that, just from being able to speak directly to senior leaders about their experiences, our mentors have already brought about change to a few things that we do as a business, particularly around the way we recruit people and where we try to find candidates.

In terms of my journey, working as a woman of colour in this organisation, I wanted to learn about the business too. Our industry can appear male-dominated and there are still more men than women in senior roles here. We have work to do as an organisation, but the RMP has planted the seed. The challenge is to ensure that we don’t slip back and forget what we’ve learned. The Diversity and Inclusion Forum now needs to keep that momentum going and keep these issues relevant and in front of the board, so they continue that learning process.”

Now that the first cohort has completed the programme, we have gathered their feedback and the results have been incredibly positive. Across 200 hours of mentoring, 95% of participants rates their sessions as “good” or “very good”, and the RMP received a net promoter score of 68.

A Moving Experience

Our CEO, Jeremy Walters, was a mentee in this first cohort and has been a strong supporter of the programme and the momentum it has built. Jeremy’s quote from the closing session we held says it all:

“In my ten years as CEO of this business, the Reverse Mentoring Programme is the single most impactful programme I have been involved with.”

Reflecting our Communities

We want to become a truly sustainable business and the diversity of our workforce is a key part of that. The profile of our teams should reflect the communities in which we live and work. We are already acting as a direct result of the RMP and we’ve started to implement our plan for improved D&I measurement, to help focus our efforts and measure our progress towards this goal.

As I’ve said in previous issues of People, Planet, Partners, we’re on a journey at Paragon, and we truly want to lead our industry in this area. But we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and our RMP will help push us in the direction of greater equality and sustainability.

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter, and if you have any questions or comments, please add them below!

Lucy