When it comes to teaching your non-IT peers about technology, you’re not going to get a lot of value out of sitting them down in a room and offering formal, structured training on the latest technology trends and what that could mean for the business. In order to get business leaders to think differently about technology, there may be value in taking a different approach.
Hopefully, the leaders in your business are already somewhat tech savvy. After all, they’re surrounded by technology all the time — from their kids to the press and beyond. A lot of times the issue isn’t ignorance of technology trends, but rather that they don’t necessarily know what they’re supposed to do with the latest and greatest technology.
For that reason, I like the notion of reverse mentoring. In the case of IT, that could mean pairing one of your technical folks with a less technical leader in the business. Over time, in a personal, one-on-one setting, the technical person helps the business leader understand how new technology can be put into action. By lowering the barrier to entry and removing formality as much as possible, you have a better chance of illumination and understanding.
Mentoring used to be about age. It used to be that a senior person in the company would only ever mentor a younger person. But with the concept of reverse mentoring, you can have a technology expert mentor a non-technology expert. You could have someone from headquarters mentor someone who’s remote and vice versa. And both parties will still get something out of this relationship. For example, just because you’ve set up a younger tech-savvy person to “reverse mentor” someone more senior doesn’t mean that senior executive isn’t going to have wisdom to impart to their junior mentor.
Have you tried a form of reverse mentoring in your organization? How has it gone?
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Bill Mayo is the former Senior Director of Information Technology at Biogen Idec., a global leader in biotechnology that focuses on applying immunobiology to neurodegenerative diseases. Bill spent more than 20 years with The Gillette Company / Procter & Gamble in a wide range of IT and Internal Audit roles. He has focused much of his career on leading change in a wide range of business environments. He has lead teams and projects in over 20 countries, was based in the UK for a time, and implemented hundreds of projects and multiple major business reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures during a career that now spans more than 25 years. Bill holds a bachelor of science in computer science and a master of business administration from Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.
