Mentorship and Reverse Mentorship: Bridging the Knowledge Gap Between Generations

INTRODUCTION

“One outcome is that the organization becomes a self-learning organization, but the biggest outcome is that we have a very engaged workforce across levels." says the founder and CEO of Lenskart. He is talking about ‘Reverse Mentoring’ and how it can help organizations be self-learning organization.

Before we delve more into reverse mentoring, let us understand the essence of mentoring first.

What is the most effective personalized way for employees to learn certain skills, reach a certain goal, learn necessary skills for career development, or even learn to navigate the challenges of the world of work?

The answer is mentoring; a process where someone with more or different experience, knowledge, and skills guides someone with lesser or different experience to help the latter progress by the way of the former’s experiences and abilities. Mentoring becomes essential in organizations for new joiners, people willing to move up to the next level in the corporate ladder, or those who just wish to learn from people more experienced than them in particular areas.

Traditionally, mentoring has continued to be widely and mostly associated with senior employees (mentor) guiding junior employees (mentee). However, the scope is expanding beyond just mentoring, and we call it as ‘Reverse Mentoring’.

EMERGENCE OF AND NEED FOR REVERSE MENTORING

Mentoring in essence means, leveraging the experiences of individuals to build the capabilities of other employees by guiding someone with less experience or skill in a particular area.

But, is it necessary that only your superior is better in all skills? Are they diverse in their experience? Yes. But are they well-versed and skilled in new-age processes, ways of work, and technology? Not necessarily.

For organizations to actually be agile, the workforce at all levels of seniority has to be abreast with the latest skills and competencies in demand, know how to apply these technologies and skills to improve process and efficiency, and to ultimately stay relevant in the market and cater to needs of all stakeholders. So, what can be done about it? The answer is given by the introduction of a concept by Jack Welch; former CEO of General Electric. He proposed the concept of reverse mentoring when GE faced a similar situation where a former senior employee was not able to fully utilize the use of available technology they had at that time. Since then, across industries, organizations such as Unilever, Procter & Gamble, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and Citibank to name a few, have leveraged on this idea of reverse mentoring.

BRIDGING THE KNOWLEDGE GAP

Reverse mentoring; young employees mentoring senior leaders: Transactional or transformational?

It can be transactional for the organization in the sense that it will help to upgrade the process and improve employee engagement and motivation multi folds for higher employee productivity gains and cost savings.

It can also be transformational in a way that it will actually allow your leaders to do better sensemaking of technology use after understanding the capabilities, gaining knowledge, and learning skills. Through this, they can understand their future workforce and their customers to bring breakthrough changes within and outside the organization. This will be done as the knowledge gap between generations is significantly reduced, first by mentoring, then by reverse mentoring. For not just skills, it can help in other areas as well. Reverse mentoring programmes, like those offered by Citi India and NatWest Group, for instance, are assisting in making the workplace more accepting of LGBTQIA+ personnel.

HOW CAN YOUR ORGANIZATION REAP THE BENEFITS?

Your organization can integrate it into your systems so that the benefits can be achieved timely. The imperative here is that it will work best when combined with mentoring which in itself has been proven to give a plethora of benefits.

1. To start with, you can do a skills analysis within the organization and also understand the market requirements.

2. After this, you can see; (a) lack of skills and (b) the gap in level/ proficiency of skills between that of senior and junior employees. Once these are identified, the mentoring will take place as it does, but the organization will have to introduce the concept of reverse mentoring in case of junior employees having more skills and knowledge in particular identified skill gaps.

Are your senior employees ready for getting mentored by junior employees?

Identifying the skills and making a plan for delivering reverse mentoring to seniors, is not enough. This has to be complemented with making interventions for removing hesitations which will arise because reverse mentoring is not the norm yet.

3. Getting the seniors ready

From the side of the seniors, they will have to be made aware that filling those gaps or learning those skills is necessary. The organization will also have to tackle the issue that the senior employees may not have trust and belief that their juniors have beneficial skills or knowledge and they may not be open to constructive feedback from less experienced people than themselves.

4. Getting the juniors ready

On the side of juniors, they may have a sense of imposter syndrome because of fear of judgment from seniors, making them downplay their abilities, not present the best of their skills, and not share constructive feedback. Once these potential issues are addressed through systemic, cultural, and communication interventions, that is when results of reverse mentoring combined with mentoring will actually bridge the knowledge gap. System interventions can include selecting the right pair of partners, setting and cascading the objective to the involved mentors and mentees, making a schedule to be followed, tracking progress, and taking and evaluating feedback.

CONCLUSION

Hence, if your organization really wants to understand your younger, future employees, empower them, understand their customers, take leverage of the era of digital transformation, and fast-track their process and adoption of this transformation, there has to be a synergy between senior and junior employees in terms of openness to sharing and taking in knowledge through the best combination of mentoring and reverse mentoring. Also, the HR team and the people managers will have to be proactively engaged in constructing the reverse mentorship program, complementing it with mentoring, addressing the challenges and hesitations, recording feedback, analyzing feedback, and making modifications accordingly to bridge the gap between knowledge and skills that exists between different generations working in your organization to achieve same objectives