Out of the Minds of Babes
Jeff Conor is 16 and completely e-literate. The 10th-grader from Olympia, Wash., knows a listserv from a link, a browser from a bot. It’s just that some of his teachers don’t. So, on some days for about an hour, Jeff the student becomes Jeff the instructor to various teachers around his school who aren’t quite as comfortable with computers.
The world of commerce--from mega-corporation chief executives to small businesses across the nation--has also had to pair younger, more tech-savvy workers with senior employees and management to keep pace with the explosive growth of computers.
“For the first time in history, we have youth knowing more than adults about something central to society, and that’s technology,” said Dennis Harper, who founded Generation www.Y, a national student computer training program, with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The trend is called reverse mentoring, and whether it’s on a formal or informal basis, young workers will be shepherding their elders across the technological divide for some time to come.
“Technology is not a passing fad; it’s fundamental now to business,” said Jerry Wind, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he recently established a reverse mentoring program. “Some older executives feel uncomfortable with technology and they need to find a way to understand it and lead their organization in light of the changes.”
But not all efforts to implement reverse mentoring go well. Santa Monica attorney Jay Foonberg says he has championed the idea for more than a decade and described the reception he got as “one great yawn.”
“Older lawyers tend to think that anything to do with a keyboard is a step down socially, so they have always had someone else do that,” said Foonberg, who wrote the best-selling legal book “How to Start and Build a Law Practice.” “Also, they like to talk and not to listen. Accordingly, they do not realize they can learn something from younger lawyers.”
Though not labeled a reverse mentor, that’s exactly what Jeff and 75,000 other students from 500 schools have been to their teachers over the past five years. As part of Generation www.Y, sixth-through 12th-graders take a semester-long course that trains them to tutor their teachers on incorporating technology into the classroom.
As a seventh-grader, Jeff helped an eighth-grade teacher and his class create more than 200 Web page reports about historical topics that otherwise would have been handwritten. “Sometimes, they do dumb things and it’s hard not to say something,” said Jeff of his adult pupils, “but I don’t.”
Only a handful of Los Angeles area schools--two private and one public--have used the program, said Harper, who lives in Santa Barbara and is a former sociology professor at the state university there. He became enamored with the student teaching notion after studying similar programs in Singapore and Helsinki, Finland--two areas that have fully embraced technology.
Reverse mentoring received a huge boost in recognition in business two years ago when Jack Welch, the chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co., directed 500 of his top managers to find an in-house tech mentor. Welch, 65, who will step down in early September as head of the world’s most valuable company, believed senior managers--often accustomed to delegating work to others--had to get their hands dirty in the tech trenches. To maintain a competitive edge, Welch felt, GE managers must acquire a working knowledge of the Web, and that included him.
Welch tapped Pam Wickham, now 39, from GE’s corporate public relations office to guide him through basic Internet training. He knew Wickham from presentations she’d made regarding a company intranet site.
“I must have done 18,000 hours of preparation for that first one-hour meeting,” said Wickham, who met with Welch about half a dozen times in all. “I wanted to be able to answer anything he asked.
“But it wasn’t a situation where I had to stand there and tell him everything I knew. It was very informal. One click would lead to 15 more clicks and the hour would just fly by,” said Wickham, who covered everything from bookmarks to competitors’ Web sites.
Wickham displayed a common anxiety expressed by most reverse mentors: nervousness about tutoring a superior. Although Wickham did not, many reverse mentors, especially students, receive special training in how to handle potentially sensitive situations.
“We tell our students that instead of telling an adult, ‘That’s stupid,’ they should say something like, ‘Well, there’s probably a better way of doing that,”’ said James Smith, of Generation www.Y. “We teach them tact.”
In addition to bettering the younger person’s social skills, reverse mentoring also has the obvious advantage of giving a lower-level worker or student a higher profile. And, in cases like the Wharton School, where MBA students are matched with top executives, it can mean a job. “Networking is a key benefit,” said Wind, whose reverse mentoring program this year will have about 30 students.
For senior executives, the mentoring relationship provides them with a customized education, usually at their convenience. It also gives them a youthful perspective they might otherwise lack.
Of course, reverse mentoring in less formal ways occurs all the time. Judy Kirpich, co-founder of a marketing and communications firm in Alexandria, Va., said when it comes to technology, she seeks out younger workers.
“I have these employees in their early 20s who were born on the Internet with a keyboard in their hands who have suggestions about our system that I would never think of,” said Kirpich, chief executive officer of Grafik Marketing Communications.
The give and take between generations helps keep a company vigorous by strengthening its business model and boosting employee morale, said Robert Zemke, a Minneapolis-based management consultant who has written extensively about the importance of cross-generational relationships in business. “It’s good business sociology. It breaks down traditional barriers. A lot of companies say they don’t want the hierarchy to get in the way of good ideas, and reverse mentoring is a good way to demonstrate that.”
Indeed, if technology continues to develop at such head-spinning speeds, businesses may soon need to institute milk and cookie breaks for their mentors.
