Mentorship is not just for the young and the “green.” As the late Dr. Jack Hughston said, “As long as you’re green, you’re still growing. Once you’re ripe, you’re next to rotten.” All of us should continuously challenge ourselves. Dental science, technologies, and the industry as a whole never stand still, and neither should we.
One of the most powerful tools we can harness at all stages of our careers is reverse mentoring. This approach may require employing a fresh mindset, putting hubris aside, and even getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. It effectively spins the conception of mentorship, where a mentor many years senior, guides a junior mentee. As technology alone accelerates at a faster and faster pace each year, reverse mentorship has never been more relevant and helpful to evolving practices, owners, and managers.
What is reverse mentoring?
The famed General Electric CEO Jack Welch is often credited as coining this term to describe management styles that involved pairing the company’s top 500 leaders with junior associates, including himself. What did these junior employees have to offer to the top of the food chain? As the Millennium approached, Welch saw the writing on the wall. He knew these junior employees had an understanding and familiarity with technologies and advancements that these older, more experienced leaders did not. For these specific needs, a role reversal occurred, whereby the junior employees mentored the senior employees.
The onslaught of major companies that have debuted their own reverse mentoring programs is a testament to how well the process worked. And this concept is just as applicable to major organizations as it is to a single dental office. You do not need to have resource-intensive, costly programs in place to leverage this reversal of roles and effectively “lift all boats” within your office.
Read related article: “Jumping the Curve” From Learner to Leader: The Power of Mentorship
The benefits of reverse mentoring
You, as an owner or manager, can benefit from the knowledge imparted by younger or less seasoned employees who have fresh perspectives, special skillsets, and the contagious enthusiasm and energy associated with first starting out. However, the benefits ripple across your entire practice. By defying conventional roles, you are supporting a culture that encourages and welcomes input from all employees, not just the most experienced or those at the top. You are putting your written principles related to valuing all employees into action, and effectively “walking the talk.”
Put more tangibly:
- Employees with interest and experience in areas like AI may be an underutilized resource. It is important for so many morale-boosting and cost-saving reasons to look within your organization for those particularly well-suited to take on certain challenges or products. Consider the expertise and strengths around you before hiring contractors or others outside of the organization at additional cost and potentially to the ire of the highly capable employee who wonders why you did not ask for their input.
- By breaking free of our own hubris and our own sentiment of “I already know everything,” there are no longer barriers to continuous improvement. Your personal and professional growth, as well as the growth of your practice, does not stall. You can reach new heights of performance and development, as you are willing and enthusiastic about learning more, potentially about subjects you did not even know existed!
- You encourage the innovation, growth, and advancement that support the sustainability of your practice. Health care organizations simply must innovate, grow, and advance. The nature of the industry demands that much. Those who fail to move forward and to stretch themselves will go the way of the dinosaurs. Reverse mentoring relationships at their core align well with the industry as a whole, as they support continuous learning and improvement.
- As a truly reciprocal relationship, the mentor garners valuable information that might otherwise remain elusive. These insights can also be incorporated right away into day-to-day operations to improve upon tasks and to grow in those high-value areas that build upon patient loyalty and new patient acquisition. Likewise, the mentee gains a great understanding of the generations and professionals who walked the path before them while also being engaged in a substantive way with leadership. They feel valued and are less likely to look elsewhere for new job opportunities.
- You are fueling healthy morale, retaining top talent, and setting your practice up for future success. After all, you will not be scrambling at the last minute to craft a business succession plan. The dominoes will all be in place as part of an organic process. You can sleep better at night, knowing that the fruits of your hard work and dedication will be in good hands.
How to implement reverse mentoring
You have already taken the first step! By reading this article, you are thinking outside of the confines of traditional practice hierarchies. You are demonstrating a willingness to innovate and to grow with fresh perspectives, and we applaud you for that. As you incorporate these concepts and put them into practice, consider the following action steps:
- Identify specific challenges or areas where you may have a skills or knowledge gap; for instance, you may not have a keen understanding of useful applications for AI or of what social media platforms to focus on when communicating with your community online.
- Assess your employees’ strengths. By understanding what they do well, you can then identify the best person to work with on the challenge or topic identified above. Often, strengths are also the very things that employees love to do and are motivated and inspired by, but this is not always the case. It is also important to ensure that the employee actually wants to take on this challenge or project and is passionate about bringing it to fruition.
- When pairing other employees as reverse mentors-mentees, be sure to establish some ground rules. Ensure that there is psychological safety and that the senior employees are not resistant to change (or even potentially hostile about the shift in power dynamics). In the same vein, the junior employee should feel supported enough to be comfortable in sharing their ideas freely. Seniors may need to be humbled, and juniors may need to be empowered, so they do not feel intimidated.
- Keep your finger on the pulse of these relationships. Too often, new approaches are embarked upon without any follow-up or follow-through. The best ideas usually come out of these innovative approaches, so ensure that any insights garnered are shared and actively incorporated into day-to-day functions and tasks.
We should always be growing. No matter how many years of experience we may have or how accomplished we may be, no one knows everything, and we can all benefit from the expertise of others who “do it better” or who simply have a unique or novel perspective to share when we get too far in the weeds. Often, the best insights and perspectives actually originate from the most unlikely and surprising of places.
About the author
Naren Arulrajah, President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, has been a leader in medical marketing for over a decade. Ekwa provides comprehensive marketing solutions for busy dentists, with a team of more than 180 full time professionals, providing web design, hosting, content creation, social media, reputation management, SEO, and more. If you’re looking for ways to boost your marketing results, call 855-598-3320 for a free strategy session with Naren. You may also schedule a session at your convenience with the Senior Director of Marketing – Lila, by clicking https://www.ekwa.com/msm/.