I have been introduced to a new concept in the work place called “reverse mentoring”. It was supposedly first introduced by Jack Welch to bridge the technology chasm between older and younger GE workers. Techopedia.com defines it as follows:
“Reverse mentoring refers to an initiative in which older executives are paired with and mentored by younger employees on topics such as technology, social media and current trends. In the tech industry or other businesses that rely heavily on technology, reverse-mentoring is seen as a way to bring older employees up to speed in areas that are often second nature to 20-something employees, whose lives have been more deeply integrated with computers and the Web.”
A number of our younger portfolio company managers are happily mentoring the older managers about Facebook, Linked In, GoToMeeting, Amazon and Twitter
This new workplace trend comes as a complete relief to me because I am getting all my tech help these days from my grandkids and they don’t know beans about EBITDA but can go on for hours about Elsa and Kristoff. I am never allowed to assume a meaningful character role in whatever version of Frozen we are playing so I naturally assume the role of Sven the reindeer. Right now the television remote, changing my greeting on my new iPhone, picking ringtones for texts and email, creating playlists, watching You Tube videos on my phone, “friending” someone and initiating and accepting Face Time are daily interventions by kids aging from 4-14. Curious George reruns, Paw Patrol, transformers, princess costumes, homework, and soccer practices make their reliability iffy, but I have been well prepared to accept the total dependency on grandkids that reverse mentoring may mean.
There is only one problem with this reverse mentoring business model; it assumes that the younger generation is really prepared for some trade-offs. Hard to understand why a millennial will see value in my grammar lessons like “him and I” can never go together. It is either “he and I” or “him and me” in exchange for how to reprogram my android phone to use my Outlook calendar when the factory default is the Google calendar? It is also unlikely that a younger office colleague is likely to see reciprocity in my advice that a business problem might be better resolved by a cup of coffee or a phone call than a text or email when he knows how to type emails and texts with both thumbs and can scroll through emails with one hand without dropping the phone while simultaneously drinking a cup of coffee. I also doubt that the next gen will find any value whatsoever in my weekly takeaways from the Peggy Noonan Columns when he knows how to find Pokémon in a rain forest.
Maybe the reverse mentoring does not have to be based on reciprocity at all and is an Adam Smith experiment in self-interest. The younger colleague has a high self interest in making his boss look techno savvy so the boss doesn’t care when he wants to “collaborate” from home on Mondays and Fridays. I may have missed my golden opportunity last week to get my own techno Sherpa had I been willing to promise Friday work from home to a person interviewing for an Associate position. Self-interest might also dictate that the month of November be declared “Take Your Boss to the Apple Store” for employers whose bonus pool is determined and paid in December. There is nothing like showing your boss how to get a new user name and password for a web site in 30 seconds with one thumb while monitoring the status of the Uber car you ordered with the other.
There are a couple of existential technology mysteries that could be solved by the reverse mentoring as well:
- What is a RSS feed?
- How can you reverse the lens on your camera phone to take a selfie?
- Why do people take selfies?
- Do you win something for finding Pokémon’s?
- How do you forward a text?
- Why are songs that I have listened to for years suddenly blocked from play in my Apple music library?
Jack Welch was a visionary and I love the idea of reverse mentoring especially for the daily struggles with passwords and user names but I fear that he was talking about managerial mentoring like large company IT strategies, systems rationalization, productivity enhancers and using social media for consumer branding. For now I will just have to accept my role as Sven the reindeer in exchange for having the grandkids unlock the mysteries of the internet of things.
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