What reverse mentoring can show us

Two years out of college, undergoing leadership training for the first time, I was taught how to negotiate with customers. I was taught that every negotiation was win-lose, and you had to win, and they had to lose, because they’re taking food off your family’s table.

Everybody else in the room believed this narrative. They were all also older than me.

As I sat there, I remember thinking, surely there’s a way for it to be win-win? To make the other person feel like they’ve won, too?

That’s the first time I can really remember perceiving a generational difference between me and the people around me. It was also the first time I knew there were things - values, priorities - that I was not willing to compromise on.

Today’s younger generations have similar strengths of their convictions. Do you know what they are? Do you know what they mean for how Gen Z and Millennials approach work, and will continue to in the years to come?

If you don’t know for sure, you shouldn’t be afraid to reach out and ask.?

Reverse mentoring

Right now, I’m doing reverse mentoring. I’m working with a 26-year-old colleague who is just starting her career, and she’s mentoring me.

For a few years now, I’ve been participating in mentoring programs, primarily with diverse candidates within Lenovo. Even though I was their mentor, I’ve often learned so much from them.

So when one of my colleagues at Lenovo started reverse mentoring as part of one of Lenovo’s many?Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, I was also inspired to try it. It’s been incredibly refreshing for me to be able to access a new way to look at and think about work styles, the workplace, careers, and priorities.

I have a few reasons for wanting to do this, though I believe it can be a valuable experience for anyone.

I work in technology. Many people I work with are from a different generation than I am; the average tech worker is five years younger than the average non-tech worker.

Considering these things, I want to make sure that I can learn others’ perspectives on the world and working life, and attempt to analyze my own biases, priorities and perspectives, so I can connect more deeply with other people when we’re working together. It’s important to me that I try to understand what each generation may think, feel or prioritize, as important as trying to understand the viewpoints of all people of diverse identities I may meet and work with.

With the phenomenon of the Great Resignation looming over every industry, I also wanted to ensure that I understood why younger people might be leaving their jobs. I believed they may have different reasons than people in my age group, and that, in my role as a leader, I could affect better change by being conscious of their reasonings, rather than simply assuming.

Finally, the pandemic threw a wrench into many companies, where younger people, especially Gen Z, came into the workforce and rarely had the level of human interaction or strong work relationships that their predecessors did. It’s important to listen for their voices, and make sure nothing there is being missed or miscommunicated due to the pandemic-driven physical separation.

A few of the many things I’ve learned

I’ve seen that people starting their careers now have different priorities to what mine were when I started my career in the 1980s. Where I prioritized advancement, now, people frequently prioritize enjoyment, purpose and meaning.

I’ve also found there are great learnings to be had from the knowledge and vocabulary that people have developed now, which are often far more sophisticated than they were decades ago. Our industries can now far more capably discuss issues such as sustainability, accessibility challenges for those living with disabilities, and wellness and mental health.

I have also seen an increasing native, natural style of interacting with technology; employees today, especially among Millennials and Gen Z, largely do not need instructions on new technology. If they have problems, they will often turn to tutorials or search engines, and attempt to solve it themselves.

This expertise and comfort with technology extends into the realm of privacy, where my perspective can be very different to that of someone raised alongside the internet. To be honest, I find it difficult to take selfies and don’t fully understand the benefits of my personal life being out on social media for everyone to see. A discussion with me about privacy is completely different from a discussion with a Millennial or Gen Z person regarding their own privacy comfort level. They see the benefits of technology ‘getting to know you’, and can adroitly navigate the complexities of managing permissions, expectations and the mental state that goes along with being regularly observed online.

These are just a few of the many things I’ve come to more deeply appreciate and understand about the people I work with thanks to my experiences with mentoring and reverse mentoring.

So what can I do with what I’ve learned??

Firstly, I have a lot of customers who are younger than I am. These learnings have also helped me understand more about where my customers are coming from, and how I can talk more in their language, and show them more about how I think and see the world too. We both can bring a lot to the equation, if we can talk to each other in ways we both understand.

When it comes to improving the employee experience for younger employees: I’ve learned that many of them want a team. They appreciate the team approach, “figuring this out together”, ideally with empathy. Today, younger employees might be more curious about the reasoning behind decisions or requests from the leadership level, check in with their team, voice their concerns and needs, and if no satisfactory arrangement can be reached, they might just ‘quiet quit’ or go get another job somewhere else in order to best serve their total wellbeing, including physical and mental health.

I believe this is a broader cultural phenomenon that contributed to the Great Resignation. When I got out of college in the 1980s, there were no jobs. If I got an interview, I was going to tie myself into knots to get and keep that job. That’s the mentality I carried through my career, though of course, it became more moderate over time.?

Contrast that to the world of the empowered worker that Gen Z is currently experiencing. (Many millennials came into adulthood just after the 2008 global financial crisis, giving many of them the same risk-averse attitudes that I carry.) That affects their mentality today, tomorrow, and for decades to come. It will become more moderate over time, like my own attitude did, but its effects will linger.

It will affect, for example, how the world eventually comes to handle the work-from-anywhere, hybrid work discussion. Far from younger employees simply wanting to stay home in their pajamas, they have found immense value in the flexibility afforded by work-from-anywhere. They can care for sick relatives, for young children, for themselves, for the world, for other priorities, and their work, at the same time, rather than being forced to put one or the other first.

Source: Lenovo’s Work For Humankind Global Research Report, 2021

That’s something I hear a lot: younger people don’t want to be forced to do things. These feelings and priorities have to shape how companies interact with their employees moving forward.?

The past and future of employee experience?

It’s hard to say for sure whether cultural phenomena have passed when you’re still close to them, but I believe it is possible that the time of the Great Resignation has passed. That being said, employee experience is still critical for recruitment and retention, especially when it comes to younger employees, who make up the largest and most mobile parts of the workforce.

For a long time, I was the youngest leader in the room. Now, looking back, with everything I have learned, I wonder how often the other leaders or employees in the room and I talked past each other, because I was from a different generation with different priorities and perspectives? How often did we fail to truly listen, to truly understand, and how often did that failure to sync affect our working relationships and our business?

Critically: how often is that still happening in teams around the world? And how can we address it?

Forty years ago, you couldn’t have had a conversation with a manager or a colleague about potential misunderstandings between different management levels or generations, or other demographic or cultural intersections.

But we’ve come to a point in history where businesses are beginning to understand that those conversations are not only possible, but necessary. By talking to each other honestly, and listening to each other, with the intention of processing and using what we’ve heard to do better, we can better shape the future of employee experience for all employees, not only those who look and think like us.