Forward Mentoring: A Reverse Mentoring Initiative to Enhance Cultural Competency and Promote Academic Leadership Capacity

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/b5qux_v1
• Publication Date: 2025-04-07T22:42:11Z
• Authors: Mali Doles; Aneesha Dasgupta; Amy Ribera; Jason Doles

Inadequate cultural competency is a significant barrier that hinders inclusivity, acceptance, and belonging. Programming to enhance in the workplace often involves trainings, workshops, seminars, or other group-based didactic offerings. While helpful, these options are not set up for engaging robust individual exploration self-reflection – both critical aspects of developing competence. Reverse mentoring leverages more diverse composition greater workforce help broaden perspectives senior leaders through honest, personal, reflective discourse. If approached with curiosity, humility, openness, reverse can be powerful tool among leaders/faculty as well promote mentor (junior colleague) self-efficacy. Here we describe initial design implementation program (Forward Mentoring) at Indiana University School Medicine. We introduce Forward Mentoring framework, outline programmatic design, present an evaluation plan assesses learning, growth, satisfaction, efficacy. Evaluation data from limited pilot presented future directions discussed.