Building Trust, Navigating Change, and Learning Through Mentoring

09 Oct Building Trust, Navigating Change, and Learning Through Mentoring

 

Strong leadership is often built through experience: navigating difficult conversations, learning from mistakes, understanding people, and having trusted advisors who help us see ourselves more clearly.

For Bobbie Dahlgren, a longtime business operations and supply chain leader and Menttium mentor, those lessons accumulated over a career spanning leadership roles at G&K Services, Best Buy, UnitedHealth Group, and U.S. Bank.

Bobbie joined the Menttium Matters podcast to share practical lessons on building high-performing teams, managing conflict, leading through change, negotiating effectively, and creating workplaces where people can thrive.

Throughout the conversation, one principle surfaced again and again: leadership starts with understanding yourself and creating the conditions for other people to contribute at their best.

Know Yourself Before You Lead Others

One of Bobbie’s foundational leadership lessons is deceptively simple: know what you are good at and recognize where others are stronger.

Rather than trying to be the smartest person in the room, Bobbie focused on assembling teams where people could contribute their individual strengths.

That approach requires both humility and confidence.

Leaders who understand their strengths and limitations can surround themselves with people who bring different skills, experiences, and perspectives. Over time, that creates an environment of mutual respect where team members have room to excel.

Mentoring played an important role in helping Bobbie develop that level of self-awareness. Through mentors, she learned more about herself and became more comfortable with the vulnerability required to say, in effect, “I don’t have to know everything.” That willingness to learn from others became one of the foundations of her leadership style.

Listen Closely Enough to Change Your Behavior

Knowing yourself is only one part of leading people well. Leaders also need to understand how their behavior affects others.

Bobbie shared an example from her time at Best Buy, when her team was transitioning into a Results Only Work Environment.

Bobbie often sent emails late at night because that was when she cleared her own inbox. She viewed the habit as part of managing her workload.

Her employees experienced it differently. They felt obligated to respond.

Once the team raised the issue, Bobbie realized that what worked for her was unintentionally placing pressure on everyone else. She changed the behavior.

The experience reinforces an important leadership principle: intent matters, but so does impact.

Creating an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking honestly gives leaders information they cannot get any other way. Listening means being willing to hear that information and then responding to it.

As Bobbie described her guiding philosophy: Be the leader you would want to work for.

Use Differences to Strengthen the Team

High-performing teams rarely consist of people who think, communicate, or work exactly the same way.

Bobbie described leading teams filled with highly capable people who also had very different personalities and working styles.

Some were comfortable with ambiguity. Others preferred greater clarity and structure. Some communicated ideas quickly and directly. Others needed more time to explain complex thinking.

Rather than trying to eliminate those differences, Bobbie learned to understand and work with them.

That sometimes meant allowing robust conversations and accepting that disagreement could become uncomfortable. The goal was to keep bringing the group back to the shared outcome they were trying to achieve.

When leaders recognize different working styles and create space for those differences, diversity of thought becomes an advantage.

Address Conflict Before It Grows

Conflict is rarely comfortable, but avoiding it usually makes the situation worse.

One lesson Bobbie learned throughout her career was that unresolved conflict tends to expand.

Her approach was to look for common ground, ask questions, listen carefully, and help the people involved identify what they were collectively trying to accomplish.

She also recognized an important leadership boundary: some situations require outside expertise.

When two senior leaders on one of her teams developed an especially difficult conflict, Bobbie brought in a neutral professional facilitator. Multiple conversations were required, but the outside perspective helped surface issues that had been difficult for the individuals involved to articulate on their own.

Strong leadership includes knowing when you can facilitate a conversation yourself and when the situation would benefit from someone with specialized expertise.

Be Straight With People During Difficult Times

Employees often look to leaders for clarity when organizations face uncertainty. While leaders may not always be able to share every detail, Bobbie believes they should communicate openly about everything they can.

Without information, people naturally fill in the gaps themselves. Rumors grow. Anxiety increases. Employees begin imagining scenarios that may be worse than reality.

Transparency gives people something more reliable to work from. Leaders can acknowledge what is known, explain what remains uncertain, and clearly identify information they are unable to share. That level of candor can build trust even when the message itself is difficult.

It can also affect retention and engagement. When employees repeatedly ask questions and receive vague or evasive answers, they may begin questioning whether they want to remain with the organization at all.

Make Change Something People Participate In

Change is difficult even when people recognize that the current way of working has problems. Bobbie recalled one of her favorite observations about change management:

Everyone’s favorite system is the one you’re getting rid of. Familiarity creates comfort. Once a change becomes real, even a frustrating process can suddenly feel preferable to an uncertain replacement.

Bobbie’s approach to change management begins with understanding stakeholders.

Leaders should resist making assumptions about those answers.

From there, Bobbie recommends developing the larger change roadmap while initially concentrating on a pilot. A pilot creates an opportunity to test assumptions, gather feedback, and involve employees directly in shaping the change.

Equally important is recognizing contributions along the way. When someone identifies a flaw in the pilot, celebrate the contribution rather than treating it as criticism. Doing so signals that leaders genuinely want feedback and gives people a meaningful role in making the transformation successful.

Preparation Builds Confidence in Negotiation

Negotiation is another skill Bobbie believes can be learned. Books, seminars, videos, mentors, and other resources can all provide strategies, but one principle consistently rises above the others:

Bobbie also encouraged her teams to role-play important negotiations before the real conversation occurred. Role-playing can feel awkward at first, but it gives people the opportunity to test approaches, experience unexpected responses, and practice how they will react under pressure. That practice builds confidence when the stakes become real.

Mentoring Requires Vulnerability

Bobbie’s perspective on mentoring comes from experiencing both sides of the relationship. She participated in Menttium’s second cohort early in her career.

At first, she admits she did not fully understand how to use the experience. She wanted to appear competent. Opening up about where she needed help felt risky, and her reluctance to be vulnerable limited what she could gain from the relationship during the first few months.

Eventually, she realized something important: her mentor was there to support her, not evaluate her.

Once trust developed, the relationship changed.

Bobbie describes mentoring as one of the most important relationships of her early career and credits the experience with putting her on a different trajectory.

Years later, she became a Menttium mentor herself. Now she has the opportunity to provide other leaders with the kind of perspective and support she once received. That full-circle experience also allows her to see how dramatically leadership and workplace conversations have evolved throughout her career.

Give People Flexibility to Build Sustainable Careers

Earlier in her career, providing employees with flexibility sometimes required leaders to quietly work around rigid corporate policies. Over time, organizations became more open to flexible work arrangements, and widespread remote work demonstrated that employees could remain productive without always being physically present in an office.

For Bobbie, flexibility has always been closely connected to trust. When people feel trusted to manage their responsibilities while also managing their lives, they often respond with greater loyalty and commitment.

Organizations that want to attract and retain strong talent should consider the full employee experience, including whether people have enough flexibility to sustain both their careers and their lives outside work.

Continue Learning From People Around You

When asked about the habits that contributed to her success, Bobbie returned to several themes that appeared throughout her career.

Working toward a shared goal without the authority of a job title develops an entirely different set of leadership skills. You learn how to influence, motivate, collaborate, and get things done because people choose to work with you.

Those experiences can become some of the most practical leadership training available.

Leadership Is a Continuous Practice

Bobbie’s career offers a useful reminder that leadership expertise does not come from having every answer. It develops through listening, reflection, preparation, experimentation, difficult conversations, and relationships with people who expand our perspective.

Mentors can accelerate that process by giving leaders a confidential place to think out loud, examine blind spots, challenge assumptions, and become more intentional about how they lead.

And eventually, many mentees find themselves giving that wisdom back.

That cycle of learning and mentoring strengthens individual leaders while helping knowledge, perspective, and experience move from one generation of leadership to the next.

Sometimes, as Bobbie likes to say, “It is what it is.”

The leadership opportunity comes in deciding what to do next.