Mentors and mentees at Real Estate Balance’s recent reverse speed mentoring session spoke to Stephanie Denton about their experiences and the impact of the event.
Real Estate Balance has been running evening speed mentoring events for some time, but recently decided to turn the concept on its head by introducing a session on reverse mentoring, where younger sectors members shared their experiences with senior property personnel.
While junior employees might have been forgiven for feeling daunted by this, Real Estate Balance managing director Sue Brown confesses she was also anxious about the concept.
“I was absolutely petrified about reverse mentoring, and I’m not sure that I actually got it right,” she says. ”I just couldn’t think of anything more frightening than being mentored by people who were substantially younger than me. But overall, it went really well and there was really good energy in the room.”
One of the benefits of the session is that people are paired with mentors outside their companies - an approach that Mentee Kirsty Wilman, Federated Hermes’ chief operating officer real estate, rated highly.
“The amazing thing about an event like this is the cross organisational aspect means people can be brutally honest, because I don’t know their bosses and it’s obviously confidential,” Wilman says. ”You get such a level of honesty that is much harder when you have programmes within one organisation, because people naturally are protective of their careers and reputations.”
“Everyone was from very different parts of real estate and that made it really interesting, because there were different points of view across each of those areas. I liked the fact that it wasn’t just my area of real estate.”
She adds that she was “blown away” by her mentors: “They were incredibly honest, well-prepared, and thoughtful about all the issues that we talked about. I didn’t have that level of confidence, clarity or drive at that point in my career, so I felt like I was really privileged to have that level of honest conversation.”
Fellow mentee Mark Allan, chief executive of Landsec, feels the fact that these are “short sharp” sessions and an alternative to traditional 12-month mentoring programs gave “small reminders of remembering people have different experiences, different perspectives, and that’s the lens through which they think”.
Wilman prepared for the event by thinking about all the questions she wanted the next generations’ perspective on.
“As organisations, we set policies, we talk about hybrid working, we talk about diversity and inclusion, and we think we know what the next generation wants,” she says. ”We set all of those policies because we know what they want. But I’m not sure that we’re very good at asking: have we got it right?”
“I might have grilled my mentors a little bit because I wanted to make the most of it and 20 minutes goes so quickly, but you can actually get to a real depth of conversation quite quickly.”
Allan echoes this, adding that having three different conversations with three mentors meant he got several different takeaways.
“You can often assume that others see things in the way that you do but I had a conversation about the challenges of joining a team or a business where you can’t see people in senior positions, role models that are seemingly from your background or look like you,” he says.
”I also had a conversation about how the younger generations looking at flexible working and hybrid working. It’s much more embedded in the way that people think about life much more generally, for a generation.”
Wilman adds: “I had a very interesting conversation about inclusion from a religious aspect. Some things were raised that I had probably hadn’t considered in enough depth. I’ll be taking that back to our internal committees. The event also pushed me to think about why I’m not having more of these conversations internally.”
One of their mentors, Reah Huggins-Sutton, a graduate surveyor at JLL and a member of the Real Estate Balance Next Gen, is impressed that the event gave more junior member of the sector a voice.
“It was my first experience participating in a reverse mentoring programme and then also being a mentor myself,” she says. ”I’ve always been on the receiving end of mentorship. This offers younger people a platform to share their lived experiences and feel like their voices are heard by key decision makers in these large organisations.”
She adds that there is great value in key decision makers in large organisations listening to the lived experiences of younger people: “I left feeling that I had made a really positive contribution. Just by talking about things that that I know well, and my own experiences, I left feeling very optimistic and positive that it will go towards the greater goal of making the real estate sector more diverse and inclusive for all.”
JLL’s Huggins-Sutton feels some progress is being made in this area: “I feel [diversity] isn’t something that’s being overlooked anymore. My organisation definitely is trying to put things in place and changes are being made.”
She says the event also gave her a confidence boost to open up about her experiences and how she perceives the working environment.
“We’re all coming from various different backgrounds, which impacts the way you view the workplace and the experiences that you have,” she says. ”I feel a lot more confident speaking to people maybe at more senior level to myself, and just being able to have honest and more transparent conversations.”
To stop former mentors slipping into old habits of running the sessions, each pairing had a red flag they could raise if roles began to reverse, with mentees taking control. But Brown confirms the event itself raised no red flags and was such a success that the REB next generation group will replicate it in the future.
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