It's National Mentoring Day again

This year our focus within the wide spectrum of mentoring is on Reciprocal Mentoring, which might be described as reverse mentoring on steroids. Reverse mentoring helps the more senior partner understand the corporate world, in which they thrive, from the perspective of an outsider; and helps the more junior employee understand the system (and especially the politics) of the organisation, so they can better work within it. Yet it has little or no impact on the system itself. In fact, it can be argued that it helps to perpetuate the system by giving it legitimacy.

Reciprocal mentoring, in contrast, tasks both co-learning partners with identifying and challenging how the system creates and sustains inequalities -- initially as mentoring pairs, but then as a collective that can address issues from both above and below, to bring about sustainable change.

We will shortly issue a guidebook on designing a reciprocal mentoring programme and a challenge to organisations to join a community of practice. Watch this space!

Let me know, if you would like to hear more!

David Clutterbuck and the Coaching and Mentoring International network