Reverse Mentorship: When Leaders Listen To Their Employees: Patrice Gordon (Transcript)

Read here the full transcript of Patrice Gordon’s talk titled “Reverse Mentorship: When Leaders Listen To Their Employees” at TEDxShoreditch 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction to Reverse Mentoring

So it’s 2018, and the People Experience Officer at Virgin Atlantic says to me, “Patrice, we’re thinking about launching a reverse mentoring program. Craig, the CEO, wants to be the mentee. Would you mind being the mentor?” First of all, what is reverse mentoring?

I had no idea what it was. When she explained it to me, I came to understand that Craig didn’t have any black women in his inner circle or in his work circle. He wanted to understand my viewpoint, my lived experience, so that he could be a more inclusive leader. So first of all, what did I say?

The clear answer for me was yes. But why was it yes? You see, it wasn’t my first rodeo of speaking truth to the powers that be. I had kind of made it my business to drive inclusion around the organizations that I’d worked for, from British Airways to Royal Mail, and now to Virgin Atlantic.

My Journey in Leadership

I sat around the leadership team table. I had power, and I recognized that I needed to use that power to drive change. I became a manager at 25. I became a finance director at 29.

But what that meant was I had people in my circle who were almost at the coal front. These are the people that did the day-to-day work. But the meetings I sat with, there was a massive disconnect between what we talked about at lunchtime versus some of the conversations I was having in these leadership rooms. And that always drove me to have the conversations with senior leaders to challenge them about some of their viewpoints and opinions.

Stepping into Inclusion at Virgin Atlantic

When I came to Virgin Atlantic, it was pretty clear that I’d stepped into my inclusion journey fully.

I came in. I said, “Look, I’m an exec coach. I really love to drive inclusion, and I’m really good at my job.”

At that point, I was head of commercial finance. So when I joined, I got involved in a few extracurricular activities. The first thing was I set up the first finance graduate apprentice program. Can you believe it? A brand like Virgin Atlantic with no graduate program, how are we going to feed the pipeline? The second thing I did was I was the first non-HR person to become a facilitator for our women’s development program. Apparently, role models only existed within HR before. I came along to challenge that status quo.

And now, facilitators are only not from HR. So finally, when it came to me being a reverse mentor, it was natural for me to step into that position to really challenge some of the assumptions that were held. So first of all, kudos to Craig, who was really brave about acknowledging where his gaps were. He was ready to step into that growth zone and really step out of his own comfort zone.

Understanding Reverse Mentoring

So first of all, does anyone know what reverse mentoring is? For those of you who don’t know, reverse mentoring is where you get someone of difference. And in my definition, I look at it in regards to the protected characteristics. So that may be age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, veteran status, just to name a few.

My intention with reverse mentoring is to make sure those senior leaders around that table have an alternative viewpoint, a viewpoint that they may not have in their personal circle or their inner circle, as Craig acknowledged. Why is this a problem? Did you know that in 2022, only 6% of the FTSE 350 were women, 19 women out of 350 as CEOs? Whilst the board composition has improved, the people that actually hold the pen and hold the power, those CEOs, there’s only 19 of them.

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The Fortune 500, guess how many? 37, 37 female CEOs. And I am a woman and I’m a woman of color. I’m not going to labor on that point too much, but ultimately, those are some of the stats that we are the most comfortable in talking about.

The Challenge of Similarity Bias

We know that similarity bias exists around the senior leadership team table. And why is that? We’re really comfortable with people who are like us, right? Like you go to an event, you see someone who’s like you, you naturally gravitate towards them because that is innate in us.

It’s Darwinism. We feel more comfortable with people who are like us. Now, what happens when someone’s like us? We think, “Oh, well, if I have a new opportunity, maybe I’ll ask them to do it because I think because they’re like me, they’re going to perform at a really high level,” right?

Who thinks that? Who thinks that, right? But then if I only select people who are like me to do the things that I want them to do, what happens to those individuals who are unlike me? So around the senior leadership team table, we have these individuals who are alike.

They maybe went to the same university or the same standard of university, live in the same area, maybe called John. But ultimately, you know, it’s a natural human experience to want to gravitate towards someone like you.

The Power of Reverse Mentoring

So one of the reasons why I’m a particular fan of reverse mentoring is because it forces you to develop a relationship with someone of difference. And we know that empathy is developed when we spend the time to get to know and understand someone of difference.

So using reverse mentoring as a tool, back to my story, Craig was really clear that he wanted to like really understand my lived experience. And did I find that uncomfortable? It was the first time that I was seen as a black female. Now, you might find that strange, but ultimately, I was known for going in, doing an amazing job and getting results.

So I didn’t identify as a black female first, I identify as someone who does a really great job. So someone wanted to see me and see me. That was revolutionary for me. And as we progress through the relationship, one of the things that we both agreed on was the reason that this transformative tool was so helpful was because Craig had a curiosity to learn.

I had a curiosity to help him learn. And then between the two of us, we got to a point where he could understand some of the experiences that I had and how it could lead him to be a better, more inclusive leader. And when you think about it in your organizations or in your day life, how much do you really lean into people of difference? How much do you have an insatiable drive for curiosity to understand an alternative point of view?

The Challenge of Embracing Discomfort

Many of us want an easy life. We lean into people who think like us so that we can agree and have discussions, but not too much on the edge because that makes us a bit uncomfortable. I think we’ll all agree that the recent events across the world over the past three years have given us almost no option but to lean into this discomfort if we are to be almost citizens of humanity. With Earth Mentoring, with the crux of it being curiosity, Craig took away that ultimately around the senior table, they needed to really be more curious about people who are different to them.

Expanding the Reach of Reverse Mentoring

So we launched the program at Virgin Atlantic. I was the lead mentor, but there was still something inside me which made me feel deeply uncomfortable that this tool wasn’t used more widely. I’m a TARD accountant first. I’m also an exec coach and an emotional intelligence expert.

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So this built really nicely in my wheelhouse. And ultimately, since 2019, I have devoted a great amount of my time and energy to research in this topic, to understanding not only how I felt nice and warm and fuzzy inside because I was seen and valued, but how could we use it to really drive change within organizations?

The Current Landscape of Work and Leadership

So I’ll give you a bit more of a bigger picture. There are several mega trends happening at the moment.

The first is obviously a digital revolution, right? We have an absolute great change in terms of the demographic makeup that we’ve got globally, which means that there are up to five generations in the workforce at the moment. We have intense urbanization, which means that the GDP almost in some cities is greater than some country GDPs. And finally, we, of course, have climate change.

Amongst all this, within organizations, we have 69% of individuals saying they feel disconnected at work. 58% of us want to feel more connected at work. 38% of us don’t actually trust our co-workers. Now, we all have a role to play, right?

And ultimately, to drive inclusion within the workplace, we need to be able to drive connectedness, and that means we need to seek people of difference and understand people a little bit more. But on top of that, we have this thing where in the old days, a leader would have a leadership style, and what he said or she said would go. So everybody in the team had to kind of assume the position and respond and reply to the leader in that way. Now, leaders have no choice now but to really lean into different leadership team styles.

The recent Deloitte Human Insights report has told us that 94% of individuals believe that a different style, a more adaptive style of leadership is now required. Unfortunately, only 23% of those actually believe their leaders have those skills to do it. So how are we going to fix this? Enter reverse mentoring.

The Importance of Psychological Safety in Reverse Mentoring

Now, we know, as we said, that empathy drives connection, and we want more connection. And ultimately, with reverse mentoring, there are a few steps that we need to take to ensure that it is a psychologically safe experience. Through my research and through the pandemic, it was really clear that organizations were a little bit responsive, not necessarily proactive in regards to what they needed to do to drive engagement, which meant that on the whole, there were lots of listening exercises, lots of reverse mentoring occurring, but actually what they really failed to do was center the experience around psychological safety, particularly for that underrepresented individual. And you’ve got to remember that an underrepresented individual going in front of a senior leader, they’re already entering into the situation with a really keen aspect of where that power balance lies.

Key Elements for Successful Reverse Mentoring Programs

So my research showed me there are a few things that we needed to make sure the organization had in place in order to ensure a successful reverse mentoring program. The first thing is that they needed to be clear as to what exactly were they trying to use reverse mentoring to fix. The second thing was making sure the leaders understood the responsibility that was on them as they entered into this relationship. So really tapping into stepping out of your comfort zone and leaning into that growth zone, which we can talk about so easily when it comes to sales or when it comes to operations, but when it comes to developing deeper relationships, we have a problem with that.

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The third thing is just really making sure that individuals aren’t forced to participate. Forced participation in reverse mentoring is rule 101. Please do not do it. Ultimately, the research showed that those individuals felt almost put upon to participate in these programs, and the burden only increased of being an underrepresented individual.

So the programs that we run are really around ensuring that there’s an application process so you can understand what a person can give and what a person needs in this whole learning journey. Making sure that there is a process where HR or the program lead is delegated and responsible for the well-being of those individuals. There’s checkings that we go through the program to make sure we’re matching towards the objective, and most importantly, that there is a bias for action.

Addressing Common Challenges

So a lot of the questions that I get challenged with and asked is like, can you force a leader who definitely needs reverse mentoring to participate? I would advise not, no. We all know that bad news travels more quickly than good news, and ultimately in these situations what you do see is not only the effect on the individual, the impact on the group, and also an impact throughout the wider organization. So it’s particularly important that those individuals come to the table because they really want to.

And then finally, I advise starting in a small group, test and learn, and then expand it too, because you want to make sure that it’s useful for the organization, and it will mean that some things will go wrong. If you enter into the learning zone and in the growth zone, you all know that things can go wrong, and that’s fine. We’ll use it as a learning opportunity, but ultimately tap into it to make sure that it gets better with time.

Applying Reverse Mentoring Principles in Everyday Life

So how can you use this in your life as well? I mean, we are here today. Please tap in and speak to someone that you might not normally speak to as we enter into the socializing part later. But ultimately, in order for us to be great citizens of the world, we really need to tap into difference. So really look at your circle of friends, identify where you might have a gap, and lean into that gap, and really understand and lean into the fact that actually difference brings more connection.

In your workplace, you might not want to do it as a formal arrangement, but really those individuals that may not speak up in meetings, those individuals that you may not have had a conversation with, tap into that difference and really lean into building more inclusive environments.

Conclusion

And so the listening, the active listening, the empathetic ear, the understanding that ultimately we need to build more connectedness as opposed to lead into a lot of the negativity and the polarization that is happening in the world is one of the key reasons that I believe reverse mentoring is one of those transformative tools that is really going to change the world. So thank you.