(iStockphoto/Sanja Radin)Increasingly, I hear and read about questions such as: Why are my best tech people leaving our great company to work on something called crypto and Web3? What are the strategic implications for my organization of new technologies that I don’t understand well? How do I talk with our younger talent about ideas they are proposing for our company’s strategic direction? Personally, should I be making use of one or more of these apps that I don’t understand?
Twenty-five years ago, there was a sense at General Electric that senior executives were not making full use of personal computing and the power of the Internet. CEO Jack Welch responded with his typical high-energy enthusiasm. After seeking out a young mentor in the organization to help him learn, he “suggested” that his senior colleagues find fellow employees under the age of 25 and arrange to meet with them to learn how to navigate a business world dominated by new technology.
Thanks to even newer technologies that enable us to stream, store, and access everything digital, we now have at our disposal a new arsenal of techniques and capabilities. For better or worse, there is a distinct and growing generational difference in the amount of time we spend staring at little screens, exchanging both essential and inane information, and transacting business at a never-before achievable clip.
The Gen Z’ers who have lived their entire lives with technologies of which many of us are unacquainted, seem to be widening the generational gap in using cryptocurrency, buying and storing art and wine with nonfungible tokens, trading new kinds of securities on new internet investment sites offering new features, and thinking up new applications for the metaverse.
I recently witnessed what this means for the rest of us. An imaginative, tech savvy caregiver we employ in our home dreamed up a business based on an unsatisfactory personal experience. Despite her lack of formal training, resources, and investment, she devised a way to test her idea, order the necessary supplies, market on social networks, and set up a payment system under her new company’s name—all in one day and all on her mobile phone while (I hope) doing her regular work. Needless to say, she can mentor me any day.
Of course, reverse mentoring goes on all the time, often in an opportunistic or happenstance manner. It has occurred at critical moments in the development of all new technologies or skills. It becomes more desirable as even the most basic appliances, such as our mobile phones and watches, become loaded with capabilities of which most of us are unaware.
In addition to the personal development that reverse mentoring provides, it forces senior executives to become more familiar with how younger, even entry-level, people think, how they work, and how and what they are consuming. To make it work, senior executives have to make themselves vulnerable to others lower in the organization, something we are told is a prerequisite for trust.
So why haven’t we seen more of it on an organized basis? Is it simply lack of time? Does it require a support structure that may be lacking in many organizations, something that can’t be created overnight? Or are these just excuses for an unwillingness of senior executives to allow themselves to appear to be vulnerable, for once lacking the answers to everything?
Is it time for more reverse mentoring? What do you think?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Editor’s Note: Heskett speculates on the influence of culture on post-pandemic employee engagement and organization performance in his book Win From Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage.
Your feedback to last month’s column:
Is Concierge Management an Answer to the “Big Quit”?
The general sense of the responses to the question is that concierge management sounds like something leaders should be practicing anyway. The only new element is that it has to be practiced in a different (remote) work environment. As David Wittenberg put it, “It might take a bit more time to connect with employees online instead of walking by their cubicles, but I can’t imagine that the burden of doing so would be excessive.”
Javior Vales said, “the responsibility of a leader is to … set and live the desired culture and to … make the team a higher performing one … the only thing that has changed is the working environment; the responsibility is the same. Leaders must learn how to do it under the new conditions.”
Peter McDermott’s response was particularly thought-provoking. He asked, “What good would an advocate or other voice provide if the entire leadership is distributed remotely and/or how would that be different than mentors/sponsors in a physical workspace? Having a voice at the table is important when it comes time for promotions and pay raises, but it doesn’t solve what brings us to work each and every day, the people we interact with … Relationships are built on trust, and trust is often founded on vulnerability. However, Zoom and Teams have stripped us of this vulnerability, allowing ourselves to digitally ‘touch ourselves up’ and go on mute for each cough or sneeze… The remote companies that win are the ones that help their employees foster valuable and lasting relationships.”