Excerpt from Reverse Mentoring

2 comments | Jan 18, 04:35 PM | best-of-earl Reverse-Mentoring | by Earl Creps

My new book is called, Reverse Mentoring: How Young Leaders Can Transform the Church and Why We Should Let Them. It was published by Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network and is available on Amazon in both hardcopy and Kindle editions.

Some amazing people have endorsed the book, including:

John Ortberg: “This book will help satisfy a deep hunger for wisdom and guidance.”

Reggie McNeal: “The richness of life sharing that is established in reverse mentoring is a largely unexplored, but promising green edge to the Christian movement. Let Earl show you how to get in on this development.”

As a way of saying “thanks” for subscribing to my newsletter, I’m providing the excerpt below from the Introduction to Reverse Mentoring:
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Aaron sprinted out of the darkness like a wide receiver playing a night game. Standing about thirty feet from him on a brightly illuminated platform, I had just begun a talk for a group of youth pastors seated amphitheater-style in the darkness common to these venues. As usual, I planned to speak from my laptop, first because I thought it looked cool (Bill Gates did it); second, because I wanted an icon to demonstrate my freedom from paper; and, third, because I liked the feel of presenting a talk from the same device on which it was composed.

So my brand new Sony sat perched on top of a black metal music stand. I also planned to wow this crowd of young leaders by abandoning PowerPoint. What could be more unique than using no media for people who spend half their lives exposed to it. The one exception would be my promise to stop at regular intervals to answer questions sent in by text message, a technique based on this group’s ultimate technology: the unexpected.

My opening remarks included the confession that I had never spent a single day in youth ministry. Pausing in the silence to let the depth of my ignorance sink in (and praying silently that my eyes would adjust to spotlight-induced blindness), I turned to the right in an attempt to establish eye contact with that sector of the room. As I did, a murmur rose from the crowd to my left, followed by the sounds of footsteps pounding into the carpet from that direction.

Turning back to my left I saw Aaron, a staff member of the group hosting the event. Bolting out of his seat on the front row, he strode toward me with a look of desperation on his face. Then I noticed the movement—the music stand supporting my laptop leaning, then tipping, then falling as if in slow motion. Even though only a few feet away, I felt frozen in place, helpless to prevent the impending destruction of all the documents, slides, graphics, videos, and other files about to disappear in a cloud of silver plastic fragments.

But Aaron started running toward me just in time. Extending his lanky frame to the maximum, he snagged my computer on his fingertips at full stride and ran through the catch as if going for extra yardage. The crowd erupted. Aaron’s heroic effort (and superb reflexes) delivered me from a presentation-ending cataclysm. I planned things that seemed “relevant” from the perspective of a mid-fifties Anglo male, even wearing brand new, thick black, “hipster” glasses. But none of it mattered if Aaron had not been caring enough, or fast enough, to catch my computer as it separated from the tipping music stand. He saved me.

This book is about the ways in which young and old leaders can serve each other through a relationship called reverse mentoring. The concept of mentoring takes its name from The Odyssey, the Greek epic in which “Mentor” appears as the person responsible for guiding Odysseus’ son as the father goes off to war. In virtually all types of leadership development, this principle of the older and wiser instructing the younger and less experienced remains in force. And for good reason: it works.

Paul doubtless mentored the younger Timothy during their travels preaching the good news about Jesus to the Roman Empire of the first century. I take my doctor’s advice on medical issues, but he never asks me for the same because only one of us possesses the training and experience worth listening to. In general, then, the kinds of knowledge and wisdom produced by age and experience qualify a person as a mentor.

Reverse mentoring assumes a completely opposite perspective on learning. While acknowledging the proven value of the older-to-younger approach (teaching down), it provides the vital complement of a younger-to-older method (teaching up). Reversing the traditional dynamics feels unnatural to some, especially older leaders like the Baby Boomers who now make up almost half of the American workforce and 60 percent of senior pastors and who have been waiting most of a lifetime to take charge. However, the rate of change in our culture puts younger people in touch with things for which their elders sometimes lack even the vocabulary, suggesting the need to go beyond intergenerational tolerance to reconciliation that leads to a new collaboration.

The young teaching the old represents only an example of reverse mentoring. The key to the relationship is not who is greater or lesser, but the unlikeliness of the learning connection. The reversal is as much one of expectations as of position or age. Every culture subsists in part by having boundaries that define it, but these boundaries also serve as barriers that cut people off from each other, making a teaching relationship unlikely. Reverse mentoring (RM) is cross-cultural in that it actually uses the unlikely possibility of a relationship to benefit both parties through mutual learning through honesty and humility.

Spontaneous (and later intentional) teaching-up experiences with a network of twentysomethings created this book. My intrepid wife Janet partnered with me in most of these adventures as our young friends became the faculty of our lives, teaching lessons large and small:

Cuisine: Hannah, after travels in Europe, tutored Janet in making the perfect cup of tea-just the way the Irish do.

Research: Riding to lunch in his SUV, Justin walked me through how to use my cell phone to perform Google searches using text messaging.

Connecting: Joel first said the word “Xanga” to me, opening up the world of social networking sites, which led me to MySpace and then Facebook.

Chatting: multiple mentors cajoled me to set up the online chat (with its inherent multi-tasking) that I am using to communicate with my friend Donnie as I write this Introduction.

Resourcefulness: Ryan explained that I could scavenge free wireless signals from the apartment building behind a Starbucks where we sometimes have coffee.

These examples can seem puny compared to the challenges that spiritual leaders face. How will Irish tea reinvent my ministry? However, their significance resides not in the immediate payoff, but in the transforming effect of unlikely relationships and in the potential for learning increasingly significant things later.

My friend Ken, for example, managing editor of my denomination’s national magazine, received mentoring from Danny, a young man living thousands of miles away that created a global presence for the publication in the blogosphere. After “getting blog literate,” Ken describes reverse mentors simply as, “young guys who help the older guys learn young stuff.” To put it simply, after many years of taking similar instruction from the young, I cannot imagine my current life or ministry without them.
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