Mary had been at the company for over 20 years. She progressed through different areas of the company and into holding more senior-level responsibilities over her career there. She was a super-connector and everyone respected her. Tom, who was Mary’s manager, thought she would be a great person to mentor Josh who was just getting started in the company. He was a few years out of college, but already had multiple internships and one other role before joining the company. He was viewed as a high potential and Mary’s manager was hoping she could help him navigate the organization and mentor him when he was having challenges.
Josh’s body language in the first meeting told her a lot about how he viewed this mentoring opportunity. He was polite but leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. He didn’t bring a notebook or pen and spoke with minimal responses. Mary asked him, “What are you hoping to gain through this mentoring experience?” He responded, “I don’t know. To be honest, I was told I had to do this and that you could introduce me to some people.” Mary could tell that he thought this was a waste of his time. She said to herself, what can I possibly teach him?
Mary decided to take a new approach with him after they had met a few times and things weren’t progressing. She asked him if he could help her with a new software program that their group had recently started using. She was doing okay with it, but knew there was more to learn. Josh had been training new users on this software and was considered a subject matter expert at it.
Josh spent some of their next meetings helping Mary learn it. She asked him questions as they discussed the software. She paid attention to the challenges he was facing and identified opportunities where he could use help. Mary asked him if he wanted to discuss where he was struggling to see if she could offer any advice to him. He said yes and they formed a great mentoring partnership from that moment on.
This is a great example of what is known as reverse mentoring. When you have multiple generations in the workforce, these mentoring relationships can bring great benefit to both mentee and mentor. As you can see in the above example, once they brought down the defenses and doubts on both sides, they were able to learn from each other. Could this be an opportunity to leverage the multiple generations in your workforce to support and learn from each other?