Why Reverse Mentoring is Challenging to Implement

The best leaders listen to—and learn from—younger, less experienced people

Article Reference: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/stanley-mcchrystal-great-leaders-learn-from-people-lower-in-hierarchy.html

Cover Image Credit: https://diversityq.com/how-reverse-mentoring-can-elevate-your-dei-agenda/

The people don’t have to be younger, or less experienced and peer-to-peer mentoring, although out of scope of this article is also extremely valuable. Leaders can learn from anyone with any title and bosses should be listening to their direct reports and teams. Everyone thinks their only accountability is to their boss and direct reporting line, it's not. A far greater accountability is to your people. Please treat them with a little more respect, take the time to actually listen to them, try to be present enough for a moment or two to allow yourself to learn from them and on occasion or way more frequently than that, action what they've been begging you to address.

From what I observe there seems to be far too much hierarchy title-based discrimination and far, far too much False Idol worship of Senior Leaders that prevents reverse mentoring to work effectively in practice. For those with Senior Leader title that warrant the title of Leader the willingness may be there, but we've been 'brought up' (the childhood of employment so to speak) in corporations, to believe Senior Leaders should be respected, regardless of merit and you shouldn't question either leader or Leader regardless.

It is our job to respect the title and ensure we are fulfilling our mandate and providing the Senior Leader with the right level of information they need to do their job and respect their time and provide them with recommended solutions. This we are called to do as employees of any organization, regardless of where we sit on the spectrum between respect and disrespect for the individual in the seat, or whether we believe they know or will appropriately against information provided. If it is a warranted escalation item, we also are required to try at least # more times to bring the appropriate attention to drive the appropriate action. Where # depends on the severity of the issue.

I'm pretty good at all of this, except the # and more often than I’d like to admit the manner in which I have presented my findings. I have been known, from time-to-time to provide the information in a manner which isn’t well received or received at all, either because I am far to excited about it or because I get far too excited about everything (good or bad) and therefore I've been unofficially branded as excess noise. Then when I do raise higher priority findings/recommendations that do warrant attention I sometimes get ignored, because leaders have to learn to cut out the unnecessary noise, me.

?Do as your told, accept your direction and if you have something important to say filter it through various lower levels of leaders or Leaders, where owing both to experience and to items noted under the leadership gap tagline, it is less likely the more juniorly titled employee will get their voice heard, especially as it related to any innovative, creative or out of the box idea. It is often hard enough just getting one’s voice heard owing to the amount of actual and unnecessary noise, and also some actual work deliverables that many employees are also subject to.

In my experience and based on my observations many leaders, regardless of seniority have little concern with ignoring less senior employees in favour of what ever their boss, mgmt. or other colleague(s) with a fancier title has told them to focus on. This is a big miss; it is the Little People who get shit done and had you listened you might already have all you need for what your boss is asking for. And more importantly Little People are the ones that hear all the chatter about what's going on and have all the gossip on you. Who else can provide you with this valuable insight? Or did you already know you have great hair?

On the flip side based more or less on everyone I talk to, employees are not willing to give direct, honest, unfiltered feedback to anyone in their mgmt. chain and worse, many are horrified by the notion that you'd even consider doing so as this is viewed as being equivalent to escalation and/or the more nasty corporate politics so widely practiced but so unacceptable for #JustASrMgr, #JustAnAVP and everyone else below to participate in; throwing someone under the bus. Unless of course it’s your boss that wants someone thrown under the bus, in that case throw harder!

The end result is everything is more inefficient, extremely frustrating and the Employee Experience is not a good one. Poor Employee Engagement inevitably leads to presentism. In all of my 20 years of experience at every organization I have ever worked at, presentism is the biggest problem organizations are facing. Trust me, I may-or-may not have played a bit too many settlers of catan games online during the pandemic, which may-or-may not have been owing to lack of meaningful work. I love me a good excel spreadsheet and there wasn't just enough need for them. On a positive note, my settlers of catan skills may-or-may not have improved greatly.

The impact this relationship can have, when employees at all levels are willing to give direct, honest, feedback to other employees at any level and employees at all levels have a reasonable baseline of respect for human beings that allows them to be present for anyone, actually listen to them and the willingness to learn is unbounded. The impact to me personally of having my boss’s boss listen to me for just 30 minutes was significant, on both a professional and a personal level. The impact of having my boss’s boss’s boss listen to me many, many, times over a few years span? That was #JustForFun and it did bring me a whole lot of #Joy, but I suspect he may have got something out of it along the way too.