Patrick Kerley gives social media advice to Burson-Marsteller CEO Don Baer. — Eli Meir Kaplan
En español | Don Baer, the 60-year-old chairman and CEO of one of the world's largest public relations companies, has had plenty of mentors. His latest is half his age.
The Burson-Marsteller executive says he and a junior colleague spend their mentoring sessions discussing everything from what's new in social media and ways it can be used to spread clients' messages to how to take a selfie with Baer's iPhone.
Baer is such a believer in the benefits of having a young mentor that he has urged some other Burson-Marsteller managers in the 2,500-person global firm to find one, too.
"A lot of this was to help those of us who didn't grow up in the digital and social media environment to understand better what was going on," he says.
The Burson-Marsteller experience is called reverse mentoring — younger staffers teaching those several rungs above them on the career ladder. Programs for reverse mentoring aren't widespread in the business world just yet, but expect to hear more about it as employers increasingly find themselves with a workforce spanning multiple generations.
Teaching critical skills
Companies with large numbers of boomers and millennials see it as a way to bridge the generation gap and create a two-way exchange of knowledge, says Wendy Marcinkus Murphy, an associate professor of management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.
Indeed, both sides have lots to gain by flipping the traditional mentor-protégé relationship.
Junior staffers have a chance to showcase their leadership skills and get career-boosting access to senior managers. Older employees pick up new skills, hear a fresh perspective from the front line and can demonstrate that they are not so set in their ways that they can't embrace new ideas. "The ability to learn is probably the most critical skill that you can have in today's workplace," Murphy says.
At PricewaterhouseCoopers, which recruits many workers right out of college, a reverse mentoring program has been going on for more than three years at its offices in greater Atlanta. The program allows senior leaders at the multinational accounting firm to connect with millennials, who, in turn, can see their careers placed on the fast track, possibly making them more likely to stay, says Bob Eichenberg, head of human resources for that region.
"If you look at the workforce and graph it out, you have a huge number of workers who are baby boomers and you have a huge number of workers who are millennials. But you take this dip when it comes to Gen Xers," he says. "The benefit of accelerating the development is that we are going to need some of those millennials to help fill leadership roles because there simply are not enough Gen Xers."
Reverse mentoring has been around informally for many years. Jack Welch, the retired CEO of General Electric, often is recognized as having introduced a formal version to the U.S. corporate world in the late 1990s. Welch picked up the idea while overseas.
When he returned, within 48 hours everyone in the company was looking for a mentor, Welch told an interviewer. "We tipped the organization upside down."
Since then, other major companies have tried reverse mentoring, including Cisco, Procter & Gamble and The Hartford.
Years ago at GE, young mentors helped Welch and hundreds of other executives learn to navigate the Internet. Nowadays, mentors teach social media, such as how to use Twitter and Instagram or create a LinkedIn profile.
Valuable conversations
Reverse mentoring goes beyond technology lessons, though. It occurs in medicine and science, where new graduates are more aware of the latest research and advances, says Babson College's Murphy. And it has been used to match executives with mentors from a different background as part of diversity training.
Mentoring typically lasts from six months to two years. Sessions often are structured around certain topics, although they aren't so rigid that protégés and mentors can't veer off into other areas of interest.
Next page: Busy executives also must make time for mentoring in order for it to work. »
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