Asking the questions you stopped asking

Most organisational structures are built on the assumption that wisdom travels downwards. Senior to junior. Experience to inexperience. 

When done well - through on the job coaching - this model provides junior members of staff with critical business lessons that they can copy or avoid in the future. And yet, it often seems to ignore the fact that senior members of staff often don’t know enough about the world today.

Reverse mentoring - where junior employees mentor senior leaders - isn't a quirky HR experiment. It's an admission that the world has changed faster than most leadership teams and boardrooms have noticed (or are prepared to acknowledge).

Yet, in my experience, the newest person in the room often sees what everyone else has stopped seeing and these insights can be invaluable to leaders.

When new employees are relatively fresh and not yet swayed by the current cultural norms, then leaders would do well to ask for their input to current issues or opportunities for improvement.

Better still, do what a CEO I worked with three years back did. When he asked me what he could do to stay in touch with the current zeitgeist or what it felt like to be a younger member of staff, I told him to create a ‘Fresh Eyes Board’ made up of diverse younger and less experienced employees.

We created a terms of reference focused on continual cultural (and brand) evolution and put out an expression of interest. To his surprise, it was massively oversubscribed. 

It has been running ever since and has raised issues related to time wastage, changing attitudes, communication preferences and ethics as well as becoming an early warning signal for behaviours deemed to be out of step with company values for the world we live in today.

Being more experienced doesn’t mean that you have all the answers. It just means that you have learned to live with the questions you've stopped asking.