Last week at a Forte Foundation Corporate Best Practices Summit. I ran across a strangely intriguing idea: reverse mentoring.

By now, everyone seems to get the fact that mentoring of some variety can play a key role in supporting professional success, particularly for women. Companies have created elaborate (and sometimes even successful) programs that, in their typical form, pair junior women with a more senior mentor, male or female. Colleges, too, are jump-starting the process with programs like those here at Babson for both our undergraduates and MBA's.

But reverse mentoring is different. It's, well....reversed. Paired with a junior colleague who is not like them, senior leaders are charged with listening and learning from women and minorities in their organizations. Instead of making diversity a top-down approach, this one is a combination of bottom up and meeting in the middle. No one seems to have done this long enough or with enough folks to declare an unqualified victory, but the organizations that are giving it a whirl are, like me, certainly intrigued.

A part of me says this sounds like a fancy new label for good old-fashioned two-way communication, something we'd all like to see more of our senior team taking on, in all of our organizations. But another part of me says who cares what we call it? If it works, just do it!

Check it out. Try it out. Let us know what happens.