Dear Dilip,
I too read this article in today's ET. However, I have following observations:
a)
Concept of Mentoring itself is yet to find its roots in India. Against this backdrop, "Reverse mentoring" is far cry.
b) While publishing this article, the esteemed newspaper could have published details of how many "ET 500" companies have Mentoring programme well in place. If they were to publish anything of this kind, I doubt they would have got any significant material to publish.
c) The companies who have mentoring programme in place, they do it superficially. I am yet to come across with anyone who has told confidently how they appraised the mentoring programme.
d) "Coaching" is often lumped with "mentoring" making it as "Coaching and Mentoring". Either concept is different. How could they conjoin these concepts and what were the organisational benefits nobody knows.
Notwithstanding this, benefits of mentoring programmes are immense. When will our HR mandarins understand that and implement "Formal Mentoring" in their company is matter of pure guesswork.
I conduct training on "Formal Mentoring Programme". You may
click here to read my comments on one of the previous posts. You may
click here to know details of the training programme on mentoring.
Thanks,
Dinesh V Divekar