Reverse Mentoring Under Fire?

A fairly anodyne Chicago Tribune article about Edelman's reverse mentoring program has created an unseemly online brouhaha. (According to the article: "Some 95 percent of the leadership in the Chicago office have Rotnems,"--that's mentor spent backwards--"and the company has expanded the program worldwide.")

First Gawker weighed in with its (slightly mean-spirited) take on the story, under the headline "Huge PR Firm Has a Bunch of Kids Digital Strategists" (strikethrough in original) in which it alleged that "Edelman, like many of its peers, is a PR firm that will charge your company a hefty fee for all the digital insight that its 23-year-old account executives can deliver. Because the people in charge aren't really so good on this "'internet' thing."

Then Gini Dietrich's FADS blog--which regular readers know is one of my favorite PR blogs-- suggested that "THE LARGEST INDEPENDENT PR FIRM IN THE WORLD just announced in the Chicago Tribune that the people who are supposed to be setting social media strategy in conjunction with communication strategy for their clients HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY'RE DOING!" Later, in the lively comments section, she added: "The senior leaders of the organization (95 percent of them) don't understand social media or its implication on how it's changing the way we do business." (The 95 percent number is presumably based on the fact that 95 percent of the leadership has a reverse mentor.)

Now Shel Holtz has responded with a spirited defense of Edelman pointing out that (a) nowhere in the article is there any claim that Edelman's senior people--95 percent of them or 1 percent of them--don't understand social media and (b) nowhere in the article does it suggest that Edelman's junior people are setting strategy. "I'm bemused," he says, "that so many people drew faulty conclusions from the article (which, by the way, was pretty poorly written in its own right) and then slammed Edelman based on those inaccurate assumptions."

I'm with Shel on this one.

First, let me say that I agree with him that the original article was poorly written--or rather than it was written in such a way that it seemed to be begging for precisely this kind of misinterpretation. I suppose one could make the case that Edelman was naïve to expect a better article or a more generous reading of it.

Having said that, I've spent a lot of time talking to agencies large and small about the digital and social media practices over the past year or so, and I've heard the words "reverse mentoring" 40 or 50 times over the past 12 months. I've done some reading, and I'd categorize it as best practice--to the extent that I would be much more worried about the 5 percent who are not participating than the 95 percent who are.

The idea that participating in a program like this is a badge of dishonor--that it implies a lack of expertise--is pretty pernicious. In fact, it's an indication of commitment to continuous learning and has very real benefits for both senior people (who get a sense of how 20 and 30-somethings are using these technologies, which often differs from their own use) and junior people (who get to forge very different relationships with senior strategists).