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Mentoring is an age-old tradition, but one company is switching things up and asking younger workers to take the lead.
Professional services firm EY has an informal program called “reverse mentoring,” when two employees of different generations are paired together to share wisdom—with millennials and Gen Z at the helm. The company already has a global mentorship program that has been around since 2020, but EY decided to pilot the smaller concept earlier this year with five pairs of staffers.
Dan Black, global leader of talent strategy for EY, tells Fortune the firm unofficially launched the initiative to better connect its dispersed and diverse group of employees. “We have this huge multi-generational workforce, almost 400,000 people, and helping to facilitate how those various generations work together is a really big thing that we continue to work on. That’s where reverse mentoring comes in,” he says.
As a people leader who is a part of the reverse mentorship program himself, Black says that in a corporate environment where AI is on every executive’s mind, leveraging the expertise of younger staffers in the tech arena is a major component of the program. Baby boomers and Gen X-ers like Black might have a leg-up in career development due to their years of industry experience, but Gen Z and millennials born into an advanced technological age are much better acquainted with digital tools.
“Understanding that newer generations are digital natives and what they can bring to the organization is huge,” Black says. “Being able to really hear and learn from people that are more comfortable with AI has been a huge win for me.”
Although Black has a lot to learn when it comes to chatbots and copilots, he counsels his reverse mentor counterpart, Jessica Lefkowitz, a talent acquisition strategy lead for EY, on other things. While she’s a millennial and several years younger than Black, their similar roles in talent management enable them to share ideas on the state of their profession. Every week Black and Lefkowitz connect over an in-person lunch.
“He would ask me about career advice, and I would answer, but I didn't know if he was taking them to heart or not,” she says. Black was considering her input, particularly when it came to her first-hand insights into the needs of hybrid and remote workers. And Lefkowitz took Black’s advice when she was struggling to figure out how to create remote internships.
“He gave me the confidence to not only do it, but also gave me really good perspective on things that we could add to it,” Lefkowitz says. “We had to take something EY had been executing more locally, and move it nationally.”
EY plans to continue piloting these five pairs and bring new partnerships into the fold. Black says it’s too early to tell if it will become a permanent fixture of the company, but that this setup has been more engaging than typical mentor relationships. Lefkowitz agrees, because instead of solely honing career guidance, they can work together to improve the business.
“This is more focused on the whole, on what we are creating together and sharing that information upwards,” she says. “It's about being able to openly connect and just have honest conversations.”
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
