At least once a month Nitin Kawale, president of Cisco Systems Canada Co., sits down for a one-on-one mentoring session with Ioana Birleanu, a twentysomething business manager in Cisco’s offices in the Netherlands.
Mr. Kawale has years of work experience and several levels of seniority over Ms. Birleanu, but he isn't the mentor in these sessions. Instead he’s the student and protégé, learning over the past year how to use social media for internal and external communication.
“I was a neophyte at that,” said Mr. Kawale, 51. “Now I’m blogging, doing video blogging and internal ‘dialogue cafés,’ and I’m preparing to start Tweeting.”
The two are partners in a relatively new type of mentoring where the traditional roles are reversed and junior employees take on the role of teacher to their more experienced co-workers. Pioneered just over a decade ago by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, reverse mentoring has been embraced by a growing number of companies, including Ernst & Young, General Motors and Procter & Gamble.
Alison Konrad, professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ont., says reverse mentoring can re-energize older employees, keep younger workers engaged and improve relationships between the different generations in the workplace.
“Senior workers can plateau and feel bored and stale, so this input of energy and ideas from a motivated younger person can be like a shot in the arm for their motivation and morale,” said Prof. Konrad. “For the junior worker, being a mentor to someone higher up gives them a lot of visibility among senior leaders in the company.”
When Mr. Welch introduced reverse mentoring at GE, his goal was to help the boomers at his company learn about new technology, in particular the Internet and e-mail. Today, companies are using reverse mentoring to encourage other types of learning, Prof. Konrad said.
For example, junior mentors can help managers understand how to motivate and retain young workers. They can also provide first-hand knowledge of a younger customer base – critical for companies aiming to tap into the youth market.
Some companies are using reverse mentoring to enhance diversity training for senior staff, Prof. Konrad said.
“Each successive generation tends to be more open and knowledgeable about diversity in society than the previous generation,” she said. “With reverse mentoring, the junior mentor can help senior leaders gain a better understanding of the issues around cultural diversity.”
Tony Ianni, a Toronto-based partner at global accounting firm Ernst & Young, said being in a reverse mentoring program has deepened his knowledge of other cultures.
Three years ago, he became the protégé of Simone Carvalho, a vice-president at Ernst & Young who was born and raised in India. Mr. Ianni said his candid conversations with Ms. Carvalho have helped him better understand how culture and religion can sometimes influence people’s actions in the workplace.
Ms. Carvalho, in turn, said Mr. Ianni has taught her a lot. “It’s been very good to understand Tony’s perspective … I use it to decide on certain things, like how aggressive I should be when making a presentation to my group.”
She said her talks with Mr. Ianni have also helped her adjust some of her own culture-based behaviour at work. For example, she said she used to have a passive approach to career-building, believing that if she performed well she could move up without necessarily articulating a desire for advancement.
“The idea was never to ask – people watch you, look at how you work and you get promoted based on what they see of you,” she said. “Whereas, in a more Western society, not only do you do a good job, you also need to set out your job expectations and not just hope somebody notices you. It was very helpful for me to learn that.”
