Latest / The Internal Move Podcast with Fexingo: Lateral Roles, Internal Transfers, and Staying at Your Company / How to Use a Reverse Mentor for Your Internal Transfer
Transcript
- Lucas: You’ve been at your company for six years. You want to move from marketing to product. You’ve read every job description, talked to three people in product, and your applications keep getting polite rejections. What are you missing? Luna: Culture fit. But not the vague kind. I mean the specific, granular, ‘how do they actually run stand-ups here’ kind of culture. Lucas: Right. And the problem is that when you’re a director or a VP, you tend to network with other directors and VPs. You’re asking the people who are furthest from the daily work. They can tell you strategy. They cannot tell you what it’s really like to be on that team. Luna: So the fix is—go the other direction. Talk to someone junior. Lucas: Exactly. And there’s a name for this: reverse mentoring. It’s usually framed as a senior person learning digital skills from a younger colleague. But it works just as well for internal mobility. Luna: Quick honest thing—a handful of our listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that’s literally what keeps this show ad-free and lets us dig into niche tactics like this. So, genuinely, if you’ve gotten value from an episode before, that’s the reason we can keep doing them. Lucas: Yeah, it’s a small group making it possible for everyone. Appreciate it. Back to the tactic—I want to walk through a specific case. A marketing manager at a Fortune 500 retailer wanted to move into the data analytics team. She’d done cross-functional projects, she knew SQL, she had the technical box checked. But she kept getting passed over. Luna: Why? Lucas: Because she didn’t understand how the analytics team actually worked. They used a different project management tool—not the one marketing used. Their stand-ups were daily at 8:30 a.m., which was early for her. They had a norm of sharing half-baked work, where marketing only shared polished decks. She was a great marketer, but she looked like someone who wouldn’t mesh. Luna: So she found a reverse mentor. A data analyst who was two years out of college. Lucas: She didn’t call it that. She just asked the analyst to coffee, said she was curious about the team’s workflow, and offered to give feedback on one of his presentation decks in return. It was a low-stakes trade. He told her about the 8:30 stand-up, the tool, the culture of showing unfinished work. She adjusted her approach, applied again, and got the transfer. Luna: And the analyst got exposure to a senior leader who later advocated for his promotion. Win-win. Lucas: Gartner did a study in 2025 on internal mobility. They found that internal transfers who had a reverse mentor were 40 percent more likely to stay beyond 18 months, compared to those who just networked laterally. The reason: they had a more accurate picture of the new role’s reality. Luna: Forty percent is huge. Especially when you consider that most internal transfers fail because of culture mismatch, not skill gaps. Lucas: Exactly. So how do you actually find a reverse mentor without making it weird? First, don’t call it that. Say, ‘I’m exploring a move to your team, and I’d love to learn from someone who’s in the trenches.’ Second, be specific about what you’re offering in return. It doesn’t have to be big—feedback on a presentation, a career conversation, a recommendation for a project. Luna: That reciprocity piece is key. You’re not just taking. You’re giving them access and visibility they wouldn’t normally have. Lucas: Third, ask questions about process, not people. Don’t say, ‘Is the manager hard to work with?’ Say, ‘How does the team handle feedback?’ Or ‘What does a typical week look like?’ You’re gathering data, not gossip. Luna: And if you’re the junior person being asked? Say yes. It’s a smart career move. You build a relationship with a senior person who can open doors later. Lucas: The marketing manager’s reverse mentor got promoted within a year. She recommended him for a stretch assignment. That’s the multiplier effect. Luna: So the takeaway: before you apply, find someone two or three levels below where you’re going. Buy them coffee. Learn the unwritten rules. Then apply. Lucas: And you’ll be the candidate who already fits instead of the one who has to prove they can learn.