Reverse Mentoring Research Articles

Effect of Reverse Mentoring on Traditional Mentoring Functions

With members of Generations X and Y coming to the forefront in the workforce and the progress in technology, reverse mentoring, in which junior employees guide their seniors, has been implemented in multinational corporations such as IBM. This study explored the effect of reverse mentoring on traditional-mentoring functions given the professional characteristics of people in Generations X and Y. Fourteen participants, who worked in various high-tech companies and practiced reverse mentoring, were divided into seven pairs and interviewed. The findings showed that people from Generations X and Y generally had advanced skills in information technology, motivation to learn and abundant resources for learning, innovative thinking and ambition, a sense of teamwork, and collaboration and coordination skills. They also influenced each other in a positive way to enhance learning outcomes. The study further showed that the three traditional-mentoring functions largely remained in reverse mentoring. This study concludes that with assistance from the human resources department, reverse mentoring should be systematized to help alleviate difficulties in managing different generations within an organization.

Reverse mentoring at work: Fostering cross‐generational learning and developing millennial leaders

AbstractReverse mentoring is an innovative way to encourage learning and facilitate cross‐generational relationships. It involves the pairing of a younger, junior employee acting as mentor to share expertise with an older, senior colleague as mentee. The purpose is knowledge sharing, with the mentee focused on learning from the mentor's updated subject or technological expertise and generational perspective. In addition, there is an emphasis on the leadership development of the mentors. Reverse mentoring is situated in the mentoring literature as an alternative form of mentoring, with unique characteristics and support functions exchanged that distinguish it from other developmental relationships. A model is developed that focuses on key variables to consider and how reverse mentoring may benefit individuals and organizations. Generational differences are also presented, and the ways in which reverse mentoring capitalizes on millennial capabilities and preferences are highlighted throughout. Finally, theoretical and practical contributions are discussed, including essential components for creating a reverse mentoring program. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Reverse Mentorships: Younger Workers Can Help Veterans Stay on Right Track

We know that mentoring is a process where a person with more experience shares it with someone, usually younger, who has less. Now enter reverse mentoring, almost the same as traditional mentoring, but typically a junior employee shows a senior employee the way— highly unusual, you might initially think. Alan Webber, co-founder of the business magazine Fast Company, once offered this gritty observation about the process: “It’s a situation where the old fogies in an organization realize that by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, you’re not in touch with the future the same way the young twenty-something’s (are). They come with fresh eyes, open minds, and instant links to the technology of our future.” In fact, this upside-down mentoring concept was introduced more than a decade ago by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, but reverse mentoring is “trending.” Interested in pursuing a reverse mentorship? Have a formal plan before you dive in, recommends Diane Piktialis, a consultant and research working group leader at The Conference Board, a business membership and research association. She focuses on issues related to the aging and multigenerational workforce and cross-generational knowledge transfer. In a 2009 article for the website Encore Careers, she cautions both parties to be aware of age stereotypes and address them head on. ‘Learn Every Day’ Formal reverse mentoring may not be practiced in your office, but it is quietly occurring daily and informally in companies worldwide, as it wears different hats such as “interning.” “Most of our interns have very strong computer skills both from engineering, architectural level and programming software levels,” says Paul Canaris, director of clinical engineering for Central Texas Veterans Health Care System in Temple, TX. Canaris’ last college-related computer course was in the early 80s. “Now, I learn every day from the interns,” he says. In his highly administrative job, Canaris finds he needs more in-depth knowledge of computers. He’s grateful for interns “fresh out of college who live and breathe PCs, networks and social media. They’ve really opened my eyes.” AAMI President Mary Logan thinks reverse mentoring is really lifelong learning, no matter one’s profession. A disproportionately large segment of the healthcare technology management sector is between 45 and 70, “middle-aged,” she suggests. “We may think we hold all the cards of wisdom, but we don’t.” Once while she mentored, reverse mentoring just happened. “I told her I’d be her mentor if she’d be mine,” remembers Logan, describing the time while, in another job, she mentored a professional in her late 20s. Logan’s younger charge ultimately helped the executive enhance her own communications technology skills. While looking for a job, Logan’s own daughter, then 25, asked her mom questions about starting About the Author

Impact of Postmodernism on Public Sector Leadership Practices: Federal Government Human Capital Development Implications

This paper explores the nexus of contemporary leadership theory and postmodern worldview influences within the public sector with special emphasis on the staffing challenges of the federal government. The postmodern values embraced by the replacement cohorts (Millennial and Generation X) for the retiring baby boomers are in direct conflict with traditional leadership theories reducing the attractiveness of governmental employment. The paper concludes with a series of specific recommendations to more closely align federal human capital development strategies with employee values and organizational needs including generational diversity education, strategic value alignment approaches, values-based recruiting and selection, more systematic mentoring programs, both traditional and reverse mentoring (younger employees coach older workers on technology issues), and a full range of work/life benefits.

Reverse Mentoring

The aging of the workforce and the concurrent advent of the Millennials represent a major demographic and sociological phenomenon that can have dominant implications for organizations, as a whole. This presents a situation, where the Boomers and Millennials will be working together for the next decade or so. In the wake of mass scale retrenchments and economic upheaval, this is creating a greater urgency for HRD professionals to focus more attention on not only retaining this amalgamated workforce but also on keeping them actively engaged. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to propose reverse mentoring as a social exchange tool, which will leverage the expertise of both generations, that is, Boomers and Millennials, respectively, by being perceptive of their different needs, value systems, and work demands. We conclude by emphasizing different outcomes of reverse mentoring program for Boomers and Millennials and identify areas for future research.

Book Review: Reverse Mentoring: How Young Leaders can Transform the Church and why we should Let them

Book Review: Reverse Mentoring: How Young Leaders can Transform the Church and why we should Let them

Mentoring global female managers in the global marketplace: traditional, reverse, and reciprocal mentoring

A stream of research exists that focuses on traditional mentoring (senior female managers mentoring junior members in a domestic organization). The literature further indicates that females are increasing in number but may receive less mentoring than males and expatriates may receive less mentoring than domestic employees. A new paradigm, reverse mentoring, has emerged (e.g., a junior person, knowledgeable of the rapid technological change and globalization of business, acts as the mentor for a senior person). This paper proposes a third type of mentoring, ‘reciprocal’, as essential for competition in global markets. It is argued that mentoring can become a strategic tool in the organizational knowledge creation and transfer process. Moreover, mentoring could serve as a competitive advantage in creating an effective support system for female global female managers.

Reverse Mentoring: An Effective Strategy for Career Growth

I'm beginning to feel technologically illiterate. When I see younger staff using wireless devices to access databases, update information, schedule appointments, and send messages to colleagues, I have no idea how they do so much electronically. Any suggestions? Has the information age left you behind? If you were educated before 1990 you've been challenged-and probably frustrated-by rapidly evolving technology. Few older pharmacists have had formal training in using new technology, and many have taught themselves by trial and error. This is a problem in all fields. One small study found that among senior clinicians using computers, only 36% received formal course training.1 Recognizing that their senior staff risked technological illiteracy, corporate entities have addressed this problem with "reverse mentoring" programs-a rare approach in health care-but one that can propel career development.

Reverse intergenerational learning: a missed opportunity?

Traditional teaching pedagogy has the young learning from the old. To improve learning in a business environment, generational differences have been identified as being potential barriers between people. There is a growing realisation that technology can be used to bridge the gap between young and old using reverse mentoring. Moving beyond the confines of using reverse intergenerational learning as a tool for only learning new IT has not yet gained general acceptance in the wider business environment. Surely this represents a missed opportunity.

Exploring the benefits of user education: a review of three case studies

This paper builds on Leslie Morton's vision of enabling users through education and training. It describes three different approaches to mediated training for medical students and clinicians provided by peers, juniors (i.e. medical students) and information specialists (i.e. clinical librarians) and considers the benefits to the participants. The training was provided either on a one-to-one basis or within teams in their work environments (e.g. offices, wards, team meetings). The first two projects (peer tutoring and reverse mentoring) suggest that contextualized training, using intermediaries, provides the direct benefit of cost-effective IT skill development and the indirect benefits deriving from the interactions between the trainers and the target groups. The third project, the outreach librarian study, provides evidence of both direct benefits (i.e. time saved, quality of service, skills acquired, financial savings and improved evidence-based medicine implementation) and indirect, long-term benefits relating to more social issues (e.g. perceptions of the library, clinical teams, job satisfaction and patient interactions). The general conclusion to emerge from this review of case studies is that the concept of educational benefits is very broad and that empirical studies need to look at both obvious and less obvious benefits.

Acceptance of the Kober Medal It only gets better

As all of you know, the New England Journal of Medicine embargoes its presentations until the date of public release. I deeply appreciate Jeff’s generous remarks. We have enjoyed a wonderful collaboration over several decades. My choice to study inflammation, an area that was not popular, was guided by wonderful early mentors. These individuals included Walter Bauer at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), who emphasized the importance of acknowledging what one did not know when providing patient care, specifically to patients with inflammatory arthritis; Elmer Becker at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who directed me to the study of the biologic consequences rather than the exquisite specificity of an immune reaction and arranged for me to move on to John Humphrey’s program at Mill Hill, England; Walter Brocklehurst, who taught me how to generate and bioassay slow-reacting substance of anaphylaxis (cysteinyl leukotrienes) using smooth-muscle preparations; Manfred Mayer of Johns Hopkins, who emphasized that serious research was characterized by “deep mining,” not “surface mining”; and Bob Ebert, who as Dean of Harvard Medical School conceived my move from the MGH to the Robert B. Brigham Hospital and the complex now known as the Brigham and Women’s Hospital to expand the effort in studying the inflammatory response. The composite outcome of their guidance has been my 45 years of focused research in inflammation, directed to the alternative complement pathway, the cysteinyl leukotrienes, and the mast cell. The inflammatory process is now dignified by the term “innate immunity.” Irrespective of nomenclature, inflammation precedes and primes an adaptive immune response and then follows that response to provide biologic meaning. Inflammation/pattern recognition is the big arena within which adaptive immunity operates as one of the controls. Importantly, there is increasing evidence of counter-regulatory or attenuating signals for both the innate and adaptive components of immunity. “Turn-off” mechanisms are as important as activation pathways, regardless of specificity; without them, we would be consumed by our inflammatory responses. My submitted title for my response to receiving the Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians was It only gets better with age and experience. Experience and focus provide a context to which new technology is easily and strategically added. Only this year, 2004, after studying slow-reacting substance of anaphylaxis for 45 years did we unexpectedly find a new set of functions. Through a second receptor, cysteinyl leukotrienes have a role in chronic inflammation. By chronic inflammation, I mean the accumulation of macrophages and fibroblasts with the laying down of extracellular matrix such as collagen. Although the acute effects of the cysteinyl leukotrienes were revealed in pharmacologic studies of animals and humans, the role of these mediators in chronic inflammation was uncovered only through transgenic approaches in which inflammation was induced in strains with targeted disruption of individual receptors. Truly, it only gets better. Like many in academic medicine, I have benefited mightily by “reverse mentoring” from pre- and postdoctoral fellows. To choose to study inflammation rather than lymphocyte biology, these trainees were inherently a risk-taking group. They made certain that we explored the primitive area of host inflammatory responses with state-of-the-art technology. Happily, many were physicians who found it easy to relate this subject to their clinical work, which, in turn, reinforced and modulated our laboratory program. Another benefit of my career in biomedical science has been my interactions with other investigators in laboratories around the world. Together, we have reached shared goals that could not have been achieved in a single laboratory or through a single discipline. The unraveling of the cysteinyl leukotriene pathway and its functions derived from interdisciplinary research involving the biochemistry of Bengt Samuelsson in Sweden, the synthetic chemistry of E.J. Corey at Harvard, the physiologic expertise of Jeff Drazen, and numerous others. These friendships between laboratories and between families continue independently of any ongoing shared science. Finally, I am blessed with a most joyful and tolerant spouse, Joycelyn, who allowed my avocation and the accompanying need to live in five-year funding cycles. Similarly, our four children and now our son- and daughters-in-law share Joycelyn’s immunity to my shortcomings and amusement when I attempt to direct their activities in any fashion. Joycelyn is both the source and the glue of the wonderful family that I appreciate so very much. I thank the Association of American Physicians for allowing me to share in the honor of this medal with those who have preceded and those who will follow.

Reverse Mentoring: A Twist to Teaching Technology

Computers are standard equipment for students of the 1990s, and most college students have access to E-mail and the Internet. Many dietitians, however, were educated and trained before technological advances brought computers to classrooms from kindergarten through grade 12 and beyond, as well as to the worksite and home. Past President of The American Dietetic Association (ADA) Ronni Chernoff (1) noted that technology is the bridge to the 21st century and one of our challenges is to make technology work for us. The Internet is now second only to the telephone in connecting people and resources, and some think that not knowing how to use the Internet will soon be as problematic as illiteracy (2). As Miller and Achterberg (3) so clearly frame it, the question is not whether to use this technology, but how to use it effectively.