Forward Mentoring: A Reverse Mentoring-Inspired Initiative to Enhance Cultural Humility and Promote Academic Leadership Capacity

Abstract

Building relationships and broadening perspectives promotes cultural competence, inclusion, and belonging. At Indiana University School of Medicine, we created an innovative reverse mentoring-inspired program (Forward Mentoring) to connect individuals across academic hierarchies with the goal of fostering relationships, cultural humility, and leadership capacity through honest, personal, and reflective discourse-all to build more inclusive and welcoming workplaces. Here we describe the novel Forward Mentoring framework, outline the initial programmatic design and implementation, and present an evaluation plan that assesses learning, growth, satisfaction, and program efficacy. Evaluation data from a limited pilot is presented and future directions discussed.