Teaming for success – Mentors help women and minorities get a step up in the business world

Once a month, either in a vacated conference room or a nearby restaurant, Beth Lay sits down for an hour or so with Christy Woodruff. Both women are veterans at their company — Siemens Westinghouse Power Generation in Orlando, Fla. — but Lay is relatively new to management, while Woodruff is one of the division’s highest-ranking women.

Harry Wessel
The Orlando Sentinel
The Spokesman Review

Their monthly meetings began two years ago, just after Lay was promoted to an operations-support management position, under the company’s formal mentoring program.

Woodruff, director of the division’s business process engineering group, is the mentor. That makes Lay the "mentee." You will not find mentee in a dictionary, but you hear it increasingly in the workplace and career-development circles. Mentoring, particularly for ambitious, upwardly mobile women and minorities, is in vogue.

"Where I work, women are scattered among different divisions," says Lay, 41, of Oviedo, Fla. Being able to bounce ideas and concerns off a 28-year veteran such as Woodruff has been invaluable to her career.

With women now filling nearly half of all U.S. management positions, female mentors are becoming more commonplace. In the past, women usually turned to men as mentors. Today, about 60 percent of professional and managerial women report being mentored by other women, according to a recent survey by the Simmons College Graduate School of Management in Boston.

Mentoring has many benefits. Companies can promote it while spending little or no money. Employees can engage in it whether their company promotes it or not. It is people helping people, one person at a time, with the helper often benefiting as much as the person being helped.

Siemens started a formal mentoring program two years ago, with Lay and Woodruff among the earliest volunteers. The program requires participants to attend a half-day training session and take a personality assessment test, with the results used to match up mentoring pairs who are encouraged to meet monthly. The pairs’ names are recorded — there currently are 50 pairs — and support from human resources is available when needed.

The formal program is open to about a third of Siemens’ work force, says Nancy Breen, the company’s director of organization effectiveness. Mentors are upper-level managers who volunteer to work with "high potential, first-line managers and experienced engineers" who are nominated for the program.

"The only rule is you can’t be mentored by your own boss," Breen says. Most mentors are paired with employees who work in a different department. But, she adds, informal mentoring relationships outnumber formal ones at her company.

Informal mentoring relationships typically start as simply as this: One employee approaches a more-experienced employee and asks, "Will you be my mentor?"

That is pretty much how it started for Tami Candelero at Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control in Orlando. Five months ago she popped the question to Doug Groseclose, director of employee and organization development. He agreed, and they signed up as a mentoring pair.

The two had their first mentoring session in December, with Candelero, a 25-year-old budget analyst, setting the agenda. She wanted and received honest assessments of her strengths and weaknesses, and talked about developing a career plan. She says her mentoring sessions have "helped me make the connection between what I learned from books in school and real-world applications."

Lockheed’s program, which has 231 "mentoring pairs," is less structured than its counterpart at Siemens. There are no personality tests or workshops. Mentors and their charges sign one-year commitments, have their names registered and are offered company support when needed. That is it.

The commitment includes a "no-fault divorce" provision, Groseclose says, that allows the relationship to end at any time, for any reason, with no hard feelings.

Mentoring is viewed as a development opportunity for less-experienced employees and as "a way to pass on the knowledge of more experienced people before they leave," Groseclose says.

That is a big reason many companies are jumping on the mentoring bandwagon, says Jay Jamrog, who heads the Human Resources Institute in Tampa, Fla.

"Forty-three percent of the civilian workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next 10 years," Jamrog says. "Companies want to bring their young workers up to speed not just on hard knowledge but on soft skills, the company culture, where to go to get things done."

The knowledge transfer is not one-way. Woodruff says she receives at least as much out of the mentoring relationship as Lay does. "We agreed in the beginning this wasn’t going to be `Christy pontificating about all her vast knowledge.’ It was to be more of a two-way street: We’d give each other feedback and learn from each other."

Sometimes the feedback can get juicy, Woodruff acknowledges. "We’ve spent a lot of time going through organizational charts, looking at what makes certain people in authority tick, what’s the right way to approach them. We’re pretty honest about it."

Lay also has mentors outside her company. She has enrolled in a yearlong leadership program run by Women Unlimited, a New York-based company that matches female participants with volunteer mentors. The mentors are male and female executives, most of whom work for Fortune 500 companies.

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