When the Student Becomes the Teacher
I have been talking about mentoring for a long time. Long enough to have heard most of the objections. "I'm too busy." "I wouldn't know what to say." "What would I actually get out of it?" That last one is worth answering seriously, because most people asking it are not being selfish. They are being honest.
Let me tell you a story.
In Chapter 3 of From Manager to Mentor, I spend some time on reverse mentoring. The idea is not new. Jack Welch put it on the corporate map in the 1990s when he instructed 500 of GE's senior executives to find a younger colleague who could teach them about the internet. His reasoning was simple: the people who understood the technology best were not in the corner offices. So he sent the corner offices to find them. It worked rather well.
Three decades later, organizations are running the same play — and occasionally producing stories that stop a room.
In late 2024, Maria Laura Tabanera, an associate analyst at Mastercard's London office, joined an online boot camp on data visualization. Something about the course leader nagged at her. She went home, dug out a photo album from her years as a kindergarten teacher in Buenos Aires, and very nearly dropped it. The 32-year-old instructor, Nicolas Lagreste Zucchini, had been in her class in July 1997. He was three years old at the time
Twenty-seven years on, Miss Lau was the student. Nicolas was teaching her Power BI, Azure, and Power Automate — the analytics tools reshaping the payments industry. His approach was not to lecture. "I don't say 'I'm the expert,'" he explained. "I say 'let's try this together.'"
The story is hard not to smile at. But the point behind it is worth sitting with.
Tabanera had made a deliberate decision. With fifteen years of her career still ahead of her, she went to her manager and asked to retrain. The answer was yes. What followed was not just skills acquisition. It was a renewal of purpose. A younger colleague who knew where she was starting from and was genuinely invested in where she was going.
The benefits run in three directions at once. Maria walks away with new skills and renewed professional confidence — and, by her own account, a rekindled appetite for learning she had not felt in years. Nicolas gains something less obvious but just as valuable: strategic insight into how a senior professional thinks, direct access to leadership conversations that would normally take a decade to reach, and the quiet confidence that comes from explaining complex ideas to someone who actually needs to use them. Mastercard gets something that no training budget reliably buys — a culture signal. When a senior vice president openly says that younger colleagues have reshaped how she approaches leadership, people notice. Hierarchies soften. Information moves faster. That is not a soft benefit. It is a competitive one.
Now ask yourself what you would get from it. Teaching sharpens thinking. Explaining something to a motivated learner forces you to understand it at a level that self-study never quite reaches. The mentor's knowledge does not diminish by being shared. It deepens.
That is the return on mentoring that rarely appears in the business case. You sign up to help someone else. You end up surprising yourself.
From Manager to Mentor: Conversations You Cannot Rehearse will be available on Amazon from 17 April 2026. Chapter 3 explores different forms of mentoring, including reverse mentoring and what it asks of both parties.
Source: "How reverse mentoring drives learning, reskilling at any age," Mastercard Newsroom, February 20, 2026. Read the original article here.
