Reverse Mentoring in Action

We see a lot of companies around Asia trying to improve communication. The concern is that, with talent shortages in so many markets, they need to get the best they can out of every employee, and that means no one should be keeping their skills or their good ideas to themselves.

The biggest challenge for many firms is getting junior employees to speak up to their leaders…maybe identifying problems, maybe offering up new ideas, maybe challenging something their leadership has suggested. How do you get people to do that when many of them come from cultures where, traditionally, older people talk and younger people listen?

One idea is reverse mentoring.

Many companies have a mentoring program; there is nothing unusual about that. It’s common for companies to identify people with the potential for future leadership and match them with a more senior person who can offer them guidance.

A few years ago, though, we worked with a bank in Hong Kong that tried reverse mentoring, where junior, GenY employees would advise senior leaders on how to use Twitter.

Social media was becoming a bigger part of the bank’s marketing strategy, and since they were trying to expand their retail banking business in a highly competitive market, they wanted to establish a more personal connection with their customers. As part of that approach, they asked their senior leaders to set up Twitter accounts and share their thoughts on a regular basis.

Since this was a new thing for some of those senior folks, they asked their most junior employees, who were more used to social media, to figure out what to post and how to post it.

At first, as you can imagine, there was some nervousness on both sides, but after awhile the discussion became more comfortable.

And then, a very good thing happened.

As the juniors and seniors talked about what to post on Twitter, that led them to talk about different subjects: how the business was doing, what new products and services were coming out, changes in society, events in the news, and more.

At some point, somebody started to realize that these junior employees represented the target demographic for many of their banking products. As the conversations continued, the senior leaders started asking more questions about their mentors’ lives outside of work, and the mentors started offering more ideas about what kind of marketing works on them. Times had changed since the senior leaders had been starting their families: there were now more households where both parents work, there were more university graduates, the internet was replacing some of the impact of print and radio advertising, and people were banking from their phones rather than in a branch.

Marketing had not kept up with the changes; the new Twitter accounts were a small change that were not really part of a bigger strategy. What the leaders started learning, as conversation opened up, was that by changing their marketing they could appeal to a larger audience of young families, and as they did so, they saw the retail banking business grow.

The point here is that, if you want your employees to start having conversations that might make them uncomfortable, you should start by creating some conversations where they are more comfortable. Once they see that it’s not so scary to talk to a Senior Vice President, and that this person actually wants to hear what they have to say, they are likely to start saying a lot more a lot more often.

Once the lines of communication start to open up, it’s amazing what kind of information gets shared and how valuable it can be. Make it easy to communicate about the easy things, and you are more likely to get people communicating about the harder things.