The emergence and importance of reverse mentoring
A new reverse mentoring toolkit to help legal organisations improve inclusion, wellbeing, and cross-generational understanding has been launched by LawCare and the University of Leeds.
What is reverse mentoring?
Reverse mentoring flips the traditional mentoring structure, typically encouraging a more junior employee to mentor a more experienced colleague or leader.
At its core, reverse mentoring is about listening, learning, and leading. By challenging traditional workplace hierarchies in this way, senior professionals have the chance to gain fresh insights from colleagues with different experiences. This can positively influence strategic decision making, and provide more junior professionals with the opportunity to be a part of changemaking within their organisation.
The hope is that this will lead to positive workplace changes, creating more equal organisational environments where all voices are heard and valued.
Why take this approach?
Reverse and reciprocal mentoring have become increasingly popular across the legal profession - and wider professional services sector - in recent years.
A growing number of organisations are thinking (or at least beginning to think) differently about hierarchies, structures and power dynamics, particularly as generational disparities become greater. The traditions and norms of days gone by often no longer feel adequate or authentic enough for the modern workplace.
There are also many other reasons beyond generational differences why those ‘at the top’ may feel distinctly distanced from or different to those ‘on the ground’. For example, senior partners in law firms versus newly qualified solicitors or trainees, paralegals and apprentices.
The world around us is changing rapidly. Climate destruction, global conflicts, and technological developments are just a few examples of significant disruptions to human lives and norms. Undoubtedly, feelings, opinions and the impact of some of these significant changes will be felt and experienced differently by different people. These world challenges are also having a significant impact on our wellbeing and mental health which we know, for many working in the law, is already at high risk.
As a result of these wider changes, our individual wants, needs and expectations of our workplaces, employers and working relationships are changing too. So, it’s more important than ever that those ‘at the top’ are meaningfully connected with the people working for and with them across their organisation.
The reverse mentoring toolkit
It may seem that an initiative like reverse mentoring is easy to set up to achieve these connections. All you need is some willing participants at different ends of the organisation, pair them up and off they go, right?!
For some people, this might work and be enough. However, for most organisations and people, there is going to be significantly more benefit to be garnered from a reverse or reciprocal mentoring scheme which is properly planned, ran and evaluated: reverse mentoring that has a purpose is much more likely to achieve results.
Enter our new reverse mentoring toolkit for the legal profession. This toolkit has been developed following a reverse mentoring pilot study during 2023-24 (see details in the toolkit from p.53), which explored the intersections of wellbeing and inclusion in the solicitors’ profession.
We gained such rich and meaningful insights from our mentors, mentees and support buddies, who generously gave their time and energy to this project, that we felt sure this needed to be shared with the wider profession.
How the toolkit can help you
The toolkit doesn’t aim to give you all the answers or even to dictate how you should do reverse mentoring. There are many, many ways to run this type of initiative. However, our hope is that the toolkit will prompt you to consider some of the right questions, with a focus on some of the challenges we know exist within the legal profession. These include:
- Whose voices are heard in design and planning?
- How should we recruit mentors/mentees?
- How should we match people?
- What might we ask mentors and mentees to talk about?
- How will we capture peoples’ experiences?
- What should our next steps be after the mentoring?
As such, the toolkit seeks to take colleagues in the law, particularly those leading on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), HR, and wellbeing work, on a supported journey from first thinking about the concept of reverse mentoring to designing, delivering and completing a structured scheme.
The toolkit aims to guide you through a step-by-step process to develop a reverse mentoring scheme which is meaningful, supported and purposeful, as opposed to something pulled together in a rush which looks and feels more like an EDI tick-box exercise.
The toolkit explores some of the potential benefits of reverse mentoring (useful if you have people in your organisation you need to convince), how to develop a purpose and key aims for your scheme, and developing your scheme with your community, including prospective employees, aspiring lawyers and external partners, such as clients.
It then focuses on some of the logistics, including guiding principles for recruiting and supporting mentors and mentees, launching your scheme successfully and meeting themes, as well as how to build and maintain community amongst the larger group throughout your mentoring journey. The toolkit also explores areas such as reflection, evaluation and next steps, as well as considering how to navigate some of the challenges and barriers you may face.
In order to support you in making this journey as easy as possible, understanding the significant time pressures many of us working in law are under, the toolkit also contains a number of templates you can use and adapt, including a reverse mentoring agreement, handbook, reflective diary template, meeting prompts and matching questions.
Already doing reverse mentoring?
You might already have a reverse mentoring scheme in your organisation. If this is you, we’d really encourage you to have a look through the toolkit and assess your own scheme against the journey steps in the toolkit. Are there any spaces where you could enhance your existing scheme?
For example, involving aspiring lawyers from a local university? Introducing support buddies for mentors/mentees? Implementing a more community-focused planning approach to your next iteration of the scheme? It can become easy to continue running reverse mentoring schemes annually and feel that everything is going well, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
However, we advocate for spending some time with the toolkit, reflecting on your existing initiative and where there may be gaps, challenges or untapped potential that the toolkit might support you to develop.
Whether you’re already doing reverse mentoring, considering it, or are completely new to it, above all, we encourage you to go for it and hope that our toolkit will support you along the way to igniting transformational new connections between people in your community.
This article is written by Rachael O’Connor, Associate Professor, University of Leeds and LawCare Trustee. Please share any feedback on the reverse mentoring toolkit with Rachael: [email protected]
You can also use CITMA Mentoring in conjunction with the reverse mentoring toolkit to help implement an effective scheme for staff to follow across your organisation. The online platform helps mentors and mentees build impactful connections based on their specific requirements submitted on their profile.