A recent event had me anchoring a speed mentoring segment. What participants probably did not expect was the reverse mentorship component.
The conversations were fascinating. But one insight kept surfacing: many older leaders are struggling to understand and navigate their relationships with younger people, particularly Gen Z.
It was not simply about technology or social media. It was about communication, expectations, workplace culture, authority, values, and even how different generations understand respect. And as I listened, I realised that some of the answers were sitting in the room, with the very young people many institutions are struggling to understand. That is the opportunity of reverse mentorship.
We often think of mentorship as knowledge flowing in one direction: the senior person teaches, the younger person learns. But organisations are increasingly operating in environments where experience is not the only form of expertise. A young professional may understand emerging consumer behaviour, digital culture, new workplace expectations or the perspectives of a generation far better than someone who has spent decades at the top of an organisation.
The challenge is that reverse mentorship requires something many institutions are not particularly good at creating: psychological safety across hierarchy.
Let’s address a timely Elephant in the Room
Recently, a conversation involving a senior leader and a young graduate trainee circulated widely online. The exchange was relatively simple: the young woman addressed the senior executive by his first name, and he politely explained that he preferred a more formal title. The internet, predictably, turned it into a much larger conversation about respect, hierarchy and generational attitudes.
I found the reaction more interesting than the exchange itself. Somewhere along the way, we began collapsing several different things into one: respect, formality, hierarchy, authority and power. They are related, but they are not the same.
I understand the distinction personally. There have been situations where I have preferred people to use my professional title rather than my first name, particularly in formal settings. The formality communicated something about the context in which we were engaging. There have also been moments when informality felt less like familiarity and more like an erosion of a professional boundary. But there is a line between maintaining professional boundaries and protecting one’s authority from challenge.
Reverse mentorship is not the removal of hierarchy. It is the intentional suspension of hierarchy as a barrier to learning.
So how do we Create Safe Spaces?
1. Separate respect from silence
Reverse mentorship cannot work if respect is interpreted as agreement or silence. A young person can respect someone’s age, experience, title and authority and still disagree with them. In fact, that ability to disagree constructively is one of the reasons reverse mentorship is valuable in the first place.
This requires institutions to become more deliberate about what they mean by respect. Respect should not simply mean knowing how to address the chairman, CEO or director. It should also mean recognising that expertise can exist at every level of an organisation. A 25-year-old may know more about how young consumers think, how a particular digital platform works, or why younger employees are disengaging than the person sitting at the top of the organisation.
The question is therefore not whether the senior person remains the senior person. They do. The question is whether their position makes it difficult for someone younger to tell them something they need to hear.
That distinction matters because silence can look like respect when it is actually fear.
2. Make psychological safety explicit
Psychological safety cannot be assumed it has to be deliberately created. Senior leaders should be clear about what they want to learn and, perhaps more importantly, what they are prepared to hear. A young person should not have to guess whether telling the truth will be welcomed or remembered against them later.
This is where vulnerability from the top becomes important. Senior leaders have to be willing to say, ‘I don’t understand this,’ ‘I may be getting this wrong,’ or ‘Tell me what I am missing.’ That admission can be more powerful than any formal programme design because it signals that the purpose of the relationship is genuinely learning, rather than giving a junior employee an opportunity to tell a senior person what they already want to hear.
There also needs to be a clear no-retaliation principle. If a young mentor believes that something they say could later influence their performance appraisal, promotion, assignments or relationship with their manager, they will naturally edit themselves. And once people begin editing themselves, the value of reverse mentorship diminishes.
The strongest programmes therefore need clear boundaries around confidentiality, feedback and consequences. People cannot be expected to speak candidly if they are unsure where their words will travel.
3. Protect the younger person from the power relationship
We can create a beautiful mentoring programme on paper, but the power relationship does not disappear because we have put two people in a room together. One person may still control budgets, promotions, opportunities or access to decision-makers. The other may still be a relatively junior employee.
So the institution has to compensate for that imbalance.One simple way is to create a protected space for the relationship. Some organisations may choose to remove formal titles during the session, use neutral meeting spaces or establish agreed rules for how conversations will work. I would not make ‘ditch the titles’ a universal rule, because, as we have already discussed, formality is not inherently oppressive. A young person should be able to say, ‘I disagree,’ without having to first prove that they understand the hierarchy.
And institutions should be careful not to turn reverse mentorship into another form of unpaid labour. The junior person is there to contribute knowledge and perspective, not to become the senior executive’s informal social media assistant, technology troubleshooter or personal Gen Z translator. That distinction protects the integrity of the relationship.
4. Teach senior leaders how to receive feedback
We have become very good at teaching younger professionals how to communicate upward.We teach them how to write emails to executives, how to present ideas, how to disagree diplomatically, how to manage stakeholders and how to navigate organisational politics. But perhaps we have spent far less time teaching people at the top how to receive downward. Because listening is not the same as receiving.
A senior leader can listen politely to a young person and then completely dismiss what they have heard. They can also become defensive, explain why the young person is wrong, or immediately turn the conversation into a lesson about how things were done in their time.
Reverse mentorship requires something different: curiosity before correction. Senior leaders need to resist the instinct to immediately translate a younger person’s experience into something they already understand. Sometimes the value of the conversation is precisely that the experience is unfamiliar. And perhaps the most powerful demonstration of this is visible application.The young person is no longer simply the mentee who happens to know technology. They become a source of institutional knowledge.
5. Make it reciprocal, structured and bounded
Reverse mentorship should not become a one-way transaction in which the senior person extracts knowledge from a younger employee. The relationship should have a two-way value loop.
The younger mentor might bring insight into Gen Z, technology, changing consumer behaviour, workplace culture or emerging social trends. The senior mentor can, in turn, provide access to institutional knowledge: navigating boards, understanding organisational politics, managing complex stakeholders, making strategic decisions or building a career over the long term. Both people should leave the relationship having learned something.
Structure also matters. Without clear objectives, a reverse mentoring session can quickly become an informal conversation that defaults back to the usual power relationship. Agreeing on a few learning pillars gives the relationship purpose and makes it easier to assess whether it is actually working.
And there should be a clear no-task zone. The senior leader should not leave the meeting thinking, ‘Great, now I have someone to fix my LinkedIn, explain TikTok to me and sort out my presentation.’ That is not mentorship. The junior person is there because they possess knowledge, perspective and insight that the institution needs. That is a very different proposition.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps the real opportunity is not to flatten hierarchy, but to make it safer for knowledge to move across it. Reverse mentorship works when both generations can listen, learn and challenge without fear.