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- Reverse mentoring pairs junior employees with senior leaders/directors, reversing the usual mentoring hierarchy.
- The key risk is tokenism, where young voices are consulted, but not empowered to change decisions.
- Success requires input before decisions are formulated, documented impact in board minutes and genuine accountability.
As more Australian boards experiment with reverse mentoring to close generational and cultural gaps in governance, experts warn the practice can easily become tokenism if it doesn’t change actual decisions.
Reverse mentoring is gaining traction among Australian boards looking to bolster their understanding of workforce culture, diversity and inclusion, customer and community expectations and AI.
The process is often described as a younger employee mentoring an older or more senior colleague. However, Dr Julie Nyanjom, a lecturer and researcher at Edith Cowan University’s School of Business and Law, sees it as a reversal of the usual organisational hierarchy, where a junior person brings knowledge and a perspective that the senior person doesn’t have.
A range of well-known Australian organisations have introduced forms of reverse mentoring, including Telstra, ANZ, Westpac, PwC and Herbert Smith Freehills. Some boards have followed suit.
While The Y Canberra’s constitution requires a young person to sit on its board, director Joshua Duke GAICD says its reverse mentoring goes beyond a single board seat. The organisation, which aims to empower children and young people, also runs a youth representative group that works directly with the board. Plus, it has two young observer positions that give emerging voices a seat in the boardroom before they take on full director duties.
“That’s not a token gesture, it’s a structural pipeline,” says Duke. “Young people get real exposure to governance and the board gets a standing generational lens on every decision.”
Similarly, Bangarra Dance Theatre, of which Duke is deputy chair, has sought younger input. “Several of our directors joined the board younger than you’d typically see across the sector. This has kept us closer to the artists and audiences the company exists to serve, even without a constitutional requirement behind it,” he says.
Duke believes this is in line with a bigger picture. “The NSW government’s Creative Communities policy has pushed the state’s major cultural institutions, including the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW and State Library of NSW, to add directors aged 18 to 28 to their boards,” he says. “Cultural institutions are expected to have young people genuinely at the table, not just consulted from the sidelines.”
Reaping the benefits of reverse mentoring
With the AICD’s 2025 Board Diversity Index revealing that the average director age on the ASX 300 has been stuck at 61 for years, even though 84.5% of directors have served under 10 years, reverse mentoring is seen as a way of rejuvenating boardroom thinking.
Nyanjom explains that boards are necessarily distanced from the day-to-day experiences of employees, customers and communities. “Reverse mentoring can shorten that distance. It gives directors access to knowledge and perspectives that may otherwise be filtered or diluted as information moves through organisational hierarchies.”
She believes reverse mentoring is particularly valuable where lived experience matters or change is occurring rapidly. Areas where it’s being applied include workforce culture, diversity and inclusion, customer and community expectations, and AI or digital transformation.
But Nyanjom adds, “These conversations should complement management reporting, organisational data and professional advice. Their particular value lies in helping directors recognise blind spots, question established assumptions and ask questions that may not otherwise arise.”
When reverse mentoring becomes tokenism
Duke says the biggest risk of getting reverse mentorship wrong is tokenism dressed up as innovation – where a young person is invited to represent the future and expected to speak for an entire generation while the actual decision-making architecture doesn’t change at all. “That’s worse than doing nothing, because it lets a board tell itself it’s listening when it isn’t,” he says.
Another risk is limiting its scope to soft topics such as culture, wellbeing and employer branding, while keeping it away from anything with real capital or strategic weight.
“If a reverse mentoring program never touches a decision that could actually go differently because of it, it’s theatre,” says Duke. “Boards should ask themselves honestly whether they’d let this input change a decision they’ve already leaned toward. If the answer’s no, don’t bother starting the program.”
Getting mentorship right
Duke says the key is to allow the reverse mentoring input to arrive before the board has formed a view. Briefing papers should also include it, not append it.
“Someone at the table must be accountable for demonstrating in the minutes where the input changed the analysis or decision. Otherwise, it evaporates into valuable feedback and nothing else,” he says.
“When executed properly, [reverse mentoring] can demonstrate that incorporating a younger perspective has accelerated the board’s understanding of emerging issues and opportunities, resulting in faster, better-informed decisions, greater organisational agility and stronger overall business performance.”
Duke stresses that reverse mentoring is not a substitute for disciplined decision-making, but an input into it. “Bringing younger or more diverse voices into that reasoning process can strengthen the quality and defensibility of the board’s judgement without diminishing its rigour,” he says.
Nyanjom was involved in a recent research project where minority employees mentored senior personnel, including directors, on diversity, equity and inclusion. The study found that effective mentoring required participants to exchange the usual learner and expert roles, personalise the relationship, act proactively, allow some spontaneity and embrace vulnerability.
“Although the language of mentor and mentee suggests a one-way exchange, the learning is often mutual,” she says. “For the program to influence a decision, the learning must enter the board’s formal information and decision-making processes. This could occur through a strategic review, a board or committee paper, a management response or a synthesis of themes arising across several mentoring relationships.”
Nyanjom says the clearest evidence of success is when directors ask different questions, recognise different risks, reconsider an assumption, explore another option or allocate resources differently.
However, she cautions that reverse mentoring should never become a substitute for genuine diversity in board composition.
“It can help boards hear voices that are absent from the room, but it should not become an excuse for continuing to exclude those voices. It should also complement broader workforce engagement, management reporting and professional advice,” she says.
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