The Wall Street Journal reports that reverse mentoring has finally cracked the workplace so that senior executives can learn more about technology, social media and the latest workplace trends. Great idea, but reverse mentoring won't work. It violates the very premise of a social media environment that it purports to address. Mentoring must be about a two-way flow of information and respect. What organizations need is collaborative mentoring. Reverse mentoring is exactly the wrong way to think about knowledge exchange in an organization. We live in a time of social networks and peer-to-peer connectivity. Calling it reverse mentoring implicitly supports the linear and uni-directional exchange of information and existing organizational hierarchies. Reverse mentoring won't work because it challenges not only the existing hierarchy but essentially tells someone who spent years developing skills that it's not good enough. Whether that's true or not, it's not how you … [Read more...]
