This past month, CMEs CEO, Lisa Fain, was a guest on the podcast “The Happy Wardrobe” with host and style coach, Erin Keam. Erin is on a journey to genuinely connect with 1000 women over the next two years. So what does a style coach and mentoring expert have to talk about? Turns out, Lisa and Erin discuss everything from receiving feedback to the benefits of mentoring to Lisa’s personal journey and even dog poop bags!
We often default to negative thinking. “What’s wrong?” “How can we fix this problem?” Stop thinking in terms of deficit, and instead focus on discovery, dream, and design.
For more on how to create an allyship partner, see our last blog post. Today, we add another component to your allyship journey. Much of the work you have done up to this point has probably been internal. You have taken the time to think about your interactions and experiences from your perspective. A good ally seeks and is receptive to feedback from others about their behavior.
You aren’t growing unless you are receiving feedback. Life experiences, perspective-taking, and feedback have taught me some of the greatest (and hardest lessons). A few years ago, I attended an event on white fragility with a group of friends. Nearly all of us are White, as was most of the audience. One of my Black friends, we’ll call her Makayla, also joined. We were waiting in line for entry to the auditorium when a White man from the crowd began questioning several group members about the premise of white fragility. In initially a curious tone, he did so but started to get more aggressive with his questions. Quickly, all of his questions became targeted towards Makayla. We were all uncomfortable with his line of questioning, yet no one stepped in to assist Makayla as she fielded all of his questions.
Makayla later told me that this had upset and disappointed her (looking back, it’s pretty apparent why she felt that way). The irony that I was in line for a white fragility talk, and I felt uncomfortable stepping in to assist my friend as she talked to a persistently ignorant white man is not lost on me. What’s more, I didn’t learn about, nor did I realize, how much this had bothered her until nearly a year later. Not only had I failed to practice what I preach, but I had also failed a friend in several ways. I did not help her when she needed help, and I had not opened myself up for feedback from her. Sure, I could talk about racial injustice research, but could I walk the walk when it mattered? If it weren’t for her sharing this story, I would not have realized that I needed to become a more active ally. While I’m glad Makayla was able to share the story, I wished that I would have a.) made myself open for feedback from her sooner, and b.) realized my mistake on my own.
This story has multiple components we can use to talk about allyship for mentors. How do you know when to step up to support a person of color? How do you ensure that you are open to feedback? How do you seek feedback? How do you respond to feedback?
Inviting Feedback
Feedback. Is it me, or does that word suck the life out of you? I’m a person that thrives off of receiving feedback, and I still hate the phrase, “Can I give you some feedback?” In her book, Feedback (and Other Dirty Words), Tamra Chandler reminds us that we are conditioned to automatically tense when we become aware of the potential for receiving feedback. Although negative feedback may not feel good, it can indeed be a gift. When Makayla reminded me of that incident, I drove home with nothing but that event re-playing in my mind. I cringed at the memory, but I needed that feedback to grow.
Receiving feedback when it comes to your allyship performance is especially difficult. It’s a direct hit to your ego and values, making it some of the most challenging feedback you will ever receive. I encourage you to seek feedback regarding your antiracist behaviors from a trusted allyship partner. By this point, you have spent time building trust, creating boundaries, and getting to know each other. Thus, feedback will feel less harmful from someone you know has your best interest at heart. You may even seek feedback about how you are receiving feedback from their feedback!
Below are some tips that you can use to prepare yourself for feedback. Practice and discuss these techniques and others with your allyship partner in your next meeting. You may choose to start with general feedback about how the mentoring relationship progresses before addressing allyship behaviors. Practicing receiving and giving feedback with your allyship partner will prepare you for other professional encounters and mentoring relationships.
As I listened to Makayla’s feedback, I had to remind myself not to plead my case or apologize, listen actively, and plan to reflect and do better next time. Try to pay attention to this as you and your partner give each other feedback.
When I got home from the conversation with Makayla, I called my allyship partner, another White woman on her own allyship journey. I told her how terrible I felt for hurting my friend, not walking the walk, and not being mindful of my mistake. She listened, and we collaborated on ways for both of us to identify moments when we can amplify voices of color and step into conversations for support. Your allyship partner will serve as a neutral agent that can help you process the event to extract the most developmental opportunities.
Use the feedback as momentum to propel you and your allyship to do better next time.
The combination of practicing and seeking feedback from like-minded folks will also give you momentum through your allyship journey. Lastly, remember that you are not alone on this journey. By now, you have your allyship partner, continue to use this relationship as a tool for reflection, practice, and discussion.
CME is honored to be named a Top 10 Mentoring Blog by Feedspot
This knotted ball is allyship. Allyship is a complicated mass of knowledge and behaviors that we have to untangle. It requires that we learn and develop and work through a knotted mass that’s wrapped up with what we know, believe, and how we operate. This requires that we get educated. Starting at the beginning of the knotted ball, you will begin to untangle knots like systemic racism, power, covert racism, and privilege, gaining a longer and longer strand of usable yarn, which you will use to develop allyship. The process may be frustrating, and you may feel like giving up. Some knots will be incredibly hard to get through, while others will be straightforward. But unlike my blanket in the closet, keep working on that ball, so you can develop concrete ally behaviors to support people of color in and outside of the workplace.
Getting educated is perhaps the most foundational piece of allyship, and it is forever ongoing, and if that sounds exhausting– it is. Thankfully, mentoring can provide you with support and direction as you begin to maneuver through the knots of racism, inequality, and social justice. In our last piece, we talked about the importance of developing an allyship partner and things to consider when selecting this partner. In Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring, authors Lisa Fain and Dr. Lois Zachary identify the three functions of mentoring that we can apply to allyship partnership:
Leaning on these three functions of mentoring can be the means through which one stays committed to their allyship journey. The following sections will elaborate on the benefits of using mentorship to foster allyship.
Support is the management and process of a mentoring relationship (Fain & Zachary, 2019). As you work through allyship materials or engage in other allyship behaviors, ensure you have an excellent connection to lean on when you need advice, support, or comfort. There are many strategies you can utilize. Here are two examples to offer:
The vision is the link that binds you and your allyship partner together. Develop a roadmap for where you’d like to be due to this relationship (e.g., an advocate in the workplace). You can do this by:
Challenging each other may be the most pivotal function of an allyship partnership. Much of the material that you will cover may challenge what you have known. Here are three steps:
A simple Google search can provide you with lists of antiracist materials. Ultimately, it will be up to you and your partner to determine what type of literature you both want to investigate.
Ask yourself:
Recognize that the foundation of allyship is understanding oppression, privilege, systemic racism, power, and white fragility. As you learn more, you might decide to discuss your learning with your mentoring partner (See note below for an important caveat). Here are three resources that might be helpful:
In our next post, we will discuss how to give and receive feedback regarding allyship behaviors.
CME is honored to be named a Top 10 Mentoring Blog by Feedspot
Find an allyship partner.
An integral part of allyship is surrounding yourself with people who are also on the allyship journey. This work can be isolating and challenging, so having a partner or list of people you can call on is essential. Just as mentoring is reciprocal, so is any partnership focused on becoming a better ally. You will need to lean on each other and seek each other out for advice perhaps more than in a typical mentoring relationship. In this case, a partner may be someone who is on a similar journey who can provide peer accountability and a sounding board. One of you may have more experience with allyship, but that does not mean that the other person won’t need additional support.
If you are white, it is important that when you select an allyship advisor, you choose someone who is also white. Why? Unlike more traditional mentorships where relationships across difference are not only valuable but encouraged, in this case, the work to be done in thwarting racism is best first done with someone of the same race as you. When processing racism, oppression, power, privilege, and fragility it can be taxing for participants in the conversations. Being an ally means that you will do what is within your power to ensure that you are not putting additional emotional labor on people of color.
In this series we will discuss three themes of allyship as it relates to mentoring: Getting Educated, Create Space, and Walk the Talk. In Getting Educated we will discuss the foundations of allyship, resources, and reflection questions that you and your mentoring partner can work through together. In the next post, Create Space, we will elaborate on two very critical pieces that take immense amounts of courage: welcoming feedback from BIPOC peers and fellow allies regarding you behavior and learning how to amplify marginalized voices in the workplace. Lastly, we will conclude our allyship through mentoring discussion with a summary of how it may look to be an Everyday Ally. This work is hard, and never ending. Mentoring pairs will need strategies to keep moving forward and engaged with this difficult material. Along the way you may feel burnt out or find yourself checking out of conversations. This is completely normal, and we will discuss how you and your mentoring partner can develop a plan to get back on track.
Take the time to identify a partner, establish ground rules, what you hope to learn, and some goals you and your partner will work towards. After creating your foundation, stay tuned for our next post on “Getting Educated” where we will discuss what type of material to review, the importance of reflection, and how you can do this work with a mentoring partner.
In American workplaces, this is particularly acute. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2000, 3.3% of all workers worked remotely. Today, that number is up to 5.2% — this is a jump from 3.7 million workers to 6.5 million workers. This trend looks as if it will continue : 90% of remote workers say they intend to work remotely for the rest of their careers.
With all the advantages of remote work in flexibility, the disadvantage is a workforce that might not ever interact in person. 21% of remote workers say that the biggest struggle of working remotely is loneliness, while another 21% said that it was collaborating and communicating. This is what Putnam described as the loss of social capital.
Yet these trends do not mean that workplaces must throw up their hands and assume that an engaged workforce and an inclusive organizational culture are futile efforts. Rather, it is more important than ever to create a work environment that builds social capital.
Social capital is most simply defined as the benefits of sociability. It is the productive outcome that arises from connectedness. It comes from meaningful relationships in the workplace where employees feel invested, think about each other, and engage in reciprocal acts of mutual benefit—it creates a sense of belonging.
Mentoring is often overlooked as a means to build social capital; though, by its very nature, mentoring is a reciprocal relationship where mentor and mentee collaborate towards a common goal that will build the mentees’ skills, knowledge, and abilities.
When an organization invests in mentoring, it nurtures four characteristics that grow social capital: conversation, connection, community, and culture. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these characteristics and how mentoring fosters growth in each.
Good mentoring begets good conversation, which is marked by the presence of dialogue. Unlike the transactional conversations that more typically occur in workplace relationships, dialogue is a rich interaction in which both parties are fully present and learning. There is deep listening, a collaboration on problem-solving, and a mutual investment in achieving a goal. Good conversations contain an element of trust and learning.Here’s how to create better conversation in your mentoring relationships:
We know that one of the most important factors that determines whether someone is engaged at work is whether they have a meaningful relationship in the workplace. One of the byproducts of good mentoring is enhanced engagement through connection with another individual, often someone with whom a relationship might not have been formed more organically. Through these connections, mentor and mentee gain broader perspective within an organization.
One mentor I interviewed—a very senior level executive—told me that his mentoring relationship helped him see how some of the rules and procedures within his mentee’s department could be improved—and he was then able to effect some changes. We often hear from mentees that they learn about additional possible career opportunities and make valuable connections through their mentors’ networks.
Here are three things you can do to create more meaningful connections in your mentoring relationships:
Social capital derives from a sense of belonging. Mentors and mentees don’t just feel more connected to each other, they feel more connected to their organizations. Research shows that mentorship increases results in better organizational citizenship— creating a better sense of community. When organizations invest in mentoring training, they are creating a cohort of mentors and mentees which further enhances a sense of belonging.
This is particularly palpable in large global organizations, or organizations with a remote or distributed workforce. Because effective mentoring requires relationship-building and because it can be conducted using video technology, it is also a way to boost engagement and create a sense of belonging and accountability.
Here are a few ways organizations can build community around mentoring.
A mentoring culture is a network of good conversations, multiple connections, and community around learning. Mentoring is embedded in the fabric of the organization, and employees at all levels understand that development is a priority and a value.
Here are some steps you can take to build a mentoring culture:
Social capital remains an essential ingredient of healthy workplaces, despite remote work increasing in prevalence. Social capital is not at risk of being eroded in its entirety; however, it is a continual pulse-point issue. Leveraging mentoring to nurture the 4Cs—conversation, connection, community, and culture—can create an increased sense of belonging in employees, thus building social capital.
About the author: Lisa Fain is the CEO of the Center for Mentoring Excellence and a global speaker on the intersection of mentoring and inclusion. Lisa is also an executive coach and a former management-side employment attorney. Her passion for diversity and inclusion work fuels her strong conviction that leveraging differences creates a better workplace and drives better business results. She is the author of the book Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring.
There you have it. Three lists of three tips and tidbits that can guide you towards better mentoring.
Co-authored with Lisa Z. Fain.
“Someday” is here, right now. We are called to pay attention. We need to make the most of this time. Time has an odd way of melting away and we can’t control it but can take action so we do not squander it.
We are reminded about the importance of connection in this time. We are in a global crisis because of our interconnectedness, and yet, it is the crisis itself that requires us to physically distance ourselves from one another. It is connectedness itself that will get us through.
We know that isolation and loneliness itself can be harmful to our health. One recent study even suggested that loneliness can shorten a person’s life by 15 years, the same amount as obesity or smoking.
In addition to the loneliness that comes from being physically distant, people are concerned about their own financial health. There have been millions of layoffs and furloughs. People are questioning their future and worrying about how to feel financially, professionally and intellectually stable. This uncertainty begets worry, which causes us to lose perspective and often, to withdraw. And so, though it is crucial to physically distance ourselves, it is social connection – not social distancing – that we need.
As mentoring experts we speak with confidence when we say mentoring is needed now more than ever. Mentoring is about connection. It is about creating meaningful relationships in work and personal relationships where mentoring partners focus on growth and development. Mentoring drives authentic conversation and promotes meaningful, supportive and sustainable relationships.
There are, of course, other benefits as well. Mentors say that through mentoring they gain knowledge about what is happening in other parts of their organization. Their perspectives are often challenged and then expanded as mentors get exposed to new ideas. They increase their own leadership competencies and find that they their individual interpersonal skills are enhanced. There are satisfaction and feel-good elements as well: satisfaction from seeing mentees develop and grow and good feelings from sharing their experience, expertise and wisdom.
For mentees, mentoring provides a welcome safety net, often reducing their stress levels. The pace of new learning increases for mentees. They gain self-confidence as their mentors create opportunities for them to test out new ideas and encourage them to try new things. Mentees feel supported as they explore career options, gain organizational knowledge and receive candid feedback.
Given these benefits, there is every reason to keep the learning and development platform moving forward. Our time in isolation provides opportunity to work on personal and professional development, self-improvement, increase capability and experience self-renewal. Rather than wait until someday, we must keep moving forward.
What better time to focus on growth and development? Many people now have time and tools like Zoom, FaceTime, GoToMeeting and Skype that make it easy to engage in virtual mentoring from home.
We know that virtual mentoring works, and it is effective. The skepticism that surrounded its efficacy just a decade ago has all but disappeared. Users, too, have become more sophisticated and adept over time. Since the emergence of Covid-19, the urgency and ability to work and learn from home has increased exponentially.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
Remember Benjamin Franklin’s words, “Lost time is never found again.” Someday has only just begun.
Now is prime time for mentoring. You could be lending your time and talent to support someone else. What knowledge and experience do you have that might support and strengthen someone else right now? Or, you could be working on your own growth and development. What knowledge and experience might take you to the next level? What are some of those things that you never had time to do that would nurture you, help you grow?
Once you’ve answered these questions, it is time to get work and find a mentoring partner.
Dr. Lois J. Zachary and Lisa Fain are co-authors of the recently released book Bridging Differences for Better Mentoring, from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Mentorship and the Importance of Story. By: Sarah Haggard
I’ve always been a storyteller. Stories entertain. They make us laugh. They make us cry. They remind us of our humanness, and leave us feeling raw and inspired all at once. They are the keepers of ancient wisdom, our legacy, and cultures all around the world. Stories hold tremendous power. We’ve all walked out of a movie hiding tears of sorrow at a story well told. Binged a Netflix series or finished a good book, and mourned it’s end. Our souls deeply moved, called into action.
So what does storytelling have to do with mentorship?
The origin of the word mentor comes from one of the great stories ever told, Odysseys. Mentor was Odysseys “wise and trusted advisor.” Today, mentors are in more demand than ever. We all want a sage advisor to turn to when the going gets tough. The challenge is, wisdom isn’t gained in the classroom nor in the boardroom; the places we most often look to for mentorship. Wisdom is gained from lived experiences, which are best told through stories.
Our age and years’ experience isn’t the sole indicator of wisdom either.
Some of us have lived a few lives over by the time we reach our twenties. While others are lucky enough to life a life of ease, privilege and stability. The truth is we’re only expert in our own life experiences, knowledge comes and goes. I lost my Mom at age 27. I mentor women in their 40s, 50s and 60s dealing with the loss of a parent because I understand grief, having lived through it. Developing the ability to narrate our life experiences using story is key to being able to mentor, or be a “wise and trusted advisor” for others.
So what can you do to become a wise and trusted advisor for someone else? The first step is to know your story. Here are five ways you can get started today.
1. Make a lifeline chart, plotting out the high and low moments in your life.
2. Make a list of common themes that emerge from that timeline.
3. Write your story, highlighting those key themes, in less than 1,000 words.
4. Practice telling your story.
5. Sign up to become a mentor, sharing your story and passion for mentoring others from your lived experiences.
In a world where mentors are in more demand than supply, getting to know your story is the greatest gift you can give someone else. It is also where you’ll find your greatest passion and purpose.
Sarah Haggard is the CEO and Founder of Tribute, a modern mentorship app for the workplace that connects employees together for mentorship through shared life experiences and stories. When not working, Sarah enjoys reading, writing, mentoring college students and spending time on her houseboat with friends and family in Seattle, WA.
Bizwomen Mentoring Monday is February 25th. Support and learn from businesswomen in your community while creating meaningful career connections.
Caitlin Mullen, Bizwomen contributor’s article highlights the ins and outs of “From Bain & Company to National Geographic Society, companies make mentoring connections”. Read the full article here.
Our own Lisa Fain took part and was quoted as saying….
The reasons companies create mentoring programs vary — to improve diversity, to build a bench of potential leaders, and to retain staffers. Though most won’t divulge what they spend on their programs, all agree on their importance. The thousands of employees who participate engage with accomplished colleagues, and many accelerate their career progress through the connections they create. Being able to keep and motivate employees is crucial and “the structured mentoring relationship is really a vehicle to do that.”
