I’d like to introduce you to the concept of Reverse Mentoring.
You may already be familiar with the term - introduced in 1999 by General Electric and used to up-skill a Board of Executives on how to use the internet, Reverse Mentoring is now transforming workplaces across the world by simply pairing together, unlikely employees and I’m one of them.
In November 2018 we produced a comprehensive white paper on Reverse Mentoring to explore how the tool can be used to support an inclusive workplace culture, diversify your current and future talent pools, broaden your demographic, retain millennial talent and support your commercial objectives and it was a huge success.
Having spent more than three months researching, interviewing and studying Reverse Mentoring and the organisations that have used the tool to achieve greatness, we shared the paper with our network and the results were overwhelming.
We had a whole community of HR professionals contact us with their stories of mentoring in different formats and amazingly, we had organisations that we had never spoken to before – tell us we had inspired their entire programme of learning and development.
We decided we couldn’t possibly not use this as a perfect platform to start our very own Reverse Mentoring programme and so at the start of 2019, I became the Reverse Mentor of Managing Director, Lee Costello.
What an incredible journey it has been. Almost reaching a year of our mentoring relationship and we have not only learned a huge amount from each other but we have helped each other to grow as employees of Stanton House – as leader and consultant.
While I have been given an insight into leadership and what that requires, I was able to offer Lee a millennial voice and a fresh perspective on how business-wide decisions impact the rest of the workforce.
I wanted to share our white paper with you once more because aside from the incredible thought-leadership from the likes of EY, Microsoft and BNP Paribas it might give you the inspiration to start your own journey with Reverse Mentoring and see if you too can build a more inclusive work-place culture. Have you ever been Reverse Mentored or perhaps you are a Reverse Mentor yourself? Please do get in touch and share your stories about how you have been impacted through Mentoring.
