Your bloWhat Reverse Mentorship Actually Requires (And Why Most Programs Skip It)g post
Clarissa Sol on why most reverse mentorship programs stop at a nice photo op — and what the ones that actually work do differently.
OFFICE CULTURE
Clarissa Sol
9/6/20263 min read
I sat in on a reverse mentoring "kickoff" once where a senior executive was paired with a junior employee for a single hour-long conversation about social media trends, and then the program was declared a success in the next town hall. Everyone clapped. Nobody met again. I've been thinking about that hour ever since, because it wasn't nothing — the executive genuinely learned something — but it also wasn't reverse mentorship. It was a really nice conversation with a label attached.
The idea itself has real history. Jack Welch ran one of the first documented reverse mentoring programs at General Electric back in 1999, pairing executives with junior staff to teach them the internet. It worked well enough that it's been reinvented, relabeled, and relaunched at companies like British Airways, PwC, and Estée Lauder in the decades since. So the concept isn't new, and it isn't a fad. What's changed is how badly organizations need it to actually function, and how often it doesn't.
What's Actually at Stake
The Springtide Research Institute surveyed nearly 6,900 people between 13 and 25, and the numbers say something I don't think most leadership teams have absorbed: 82% of them prefer working under a supervisor who cares about them and can relate to them beyond work tasks, and 73% say they're motivated to perform better specifically when they feel that care. That's not a preference about perks or flexibility. It's a statement about the relationship itself — and a one-hour kickoff conversation doesn't build a relationship. It performs one.
I think this is where a lot of well-intentioned programs quietly fail. They're built to demonstrate that leadership is listening to younger employees, which is a real and worthwhile goal, but they're structured like a single meeting instead of an actual mentoring relationship with two-way accountability. A junior employee teaching a senior leader how to use a new platform for forty-five minutes is a favor. It's not mentorship until there's an ongoing exchange, a shared understanding of what each person is getting from it, and enough repetition that trust has room to form.
What the Programs That Work Actually Do
The organizations that have made this last — and NSPCC's program, which pairs around fifty senior leaders with junior staff annually, is a good example — share a few things the one-off kickoff versions skip entirely.
They run on a real cadence, not a single event. A relationship that meets once isn't a mentoring relationship, reverse or otherwise. The programs that stick treat this like any other recurring commitment on the calendar, not a symbolic gesture that happens once and gets photographed.
They define what the senior person is actually there to learn — and admit they don't know it yet. Vague goals like "understand Gen Z better" produce vague, forgettable conversations. Specific goals — understanding how the junior employee's team actually uses a tool, or what they see that leadership doesn't from where they sit — produce something usable.
They protect the junior participant from becoming a token. If the same one or two younger employees get tapped for every reverse mentoring photo opportunity, the program has become representation theater rather than an actual exchange. Rotate who's included, and make sure participation isn't just falling to whoever's already comfortable speaking up to executives.
What I Keep Coming Back To
The 82% and 73% numbers from Springtide aren't really about mentorship programs specifically — they're about whether younger employees believe anyone senior actually sees them as a whole person rather than a headcount with a skill gap to close. A well-run reverse mentoring relationship can be one place that belief gets built. A single kickoff conversation, however well-intentioned, mostly just tells people what they already suspected: that the appearance of listening was the actual goal. The difference between the two isn't effort. It's whether anyone shows up again the following month.
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