Global law firm Reed Smith has gained two national awards – for ‘People and Performance’ and ‘Staff Development’ – at this year’s fourth annual Peer Awards for Excellence. The awards, which are open to businesses in all sectors, celebrate innovative people and performance, customer engagement and corporate responsibility initiatives.
The firm won both awards for its creative ‘reverse mentoring’ scheme. Last year the firm launched an ‘MA/LPC with Business’ course for its graduates, unique in the legal sector, which includes new MBA learning and a client placement. During the year before they joined, the firm wanted to integrate the graduates into the firm whilst also creating opportunities for this group to embed their new learning and to develop leadership skills. One way to achieve these objectives was the ‘reverse mentoring’ programme, whereby the graduates regularly ran group mentoring sessions in our offices for more senior members of the firm, on the MBA business and strategy topics covered in the course. The initiative thereby shared the new learning ‘upwards’ effectively across the business.
Nigel Spencer, Global Director for Learning and Development, commented:
“Reverse mentoring is a great way to stretch developmentally younger members of the firm, to enable them to embed learning by taking on a ‘teacher’ role, and it also creates a practical opportunity for them to lead. In this initiative, the graduates found it really helpful on a number of levels: they regularly came into the firm for sessions in the year before joining and met other generations and therefore felt more integrated in the year before they joined. This built their confidence a lot and also gave them an opportunity to apply the models they had learnt to businesses in our firm’s key industry sectors – building the graduates’ knowledge about our clients and business before joining.”
Along with Nigel Spencer, trainee Kalish Mullen and MA/LPC graduate Becca Naylor presented the initiative alongside all other shortlisted candidates to the awards judges in June this year.
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About Reed Smith
Reed Smith is a global relationship law firm, with more than 1,800 lawyers in 25 offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States.
For further information please visit www.reedsmith.com or contact Annabelle Price (Branding & Communication Executive EME) on +44 (0)20 3116 3787.