26 Aug The Power of Mentoring, Perspective, and Connection
What can one mentoring experience change?
For six women who participated in Menttium’s mentoring program in 1998, the answer reaches far beyond a single year of professional development.
Nearly three decades later, they are still connected.
Their careers took them through organizations including Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Xerox, Genentech, Roche, and KLA. They moved into new functions, stepped into senior leadership roles, mentored others, changed jobs, and navigated major career decisions. Yet the relationships and lessons that began through Menttium remained with them.
When they recently gathered to reflect on their Menttium experience, several themes emerged: the value of an outside perspective, the confidence that comes from seeing your capabilities more clearly, the importance of relationships, and the lasting impact of learning alongside people whose experiences differ from your own.
A Different Perspective Can Change a Career
One of the most powerful elements of cross-company mentoring is gaining access to a perspective you cannot easily find inside your own organization.
Michelle Rohrer, who was nominated for Menttium by Genentech, described how her mentor helped her interpret what she was experiencing at work through the lens of someone who had already built a long leadership career.
That outside perspective gave her greater confidence as she moved from being a clinical scientist into the regulatory side of the organization.
Decades later, as she prepares for retirement, she is serving as Senior Vice President of the global regulatory organization across Genentech and Roche Pharmaceuticals.
For Marilyn Hollinger, the value came from being matched with someone whose career initially seemed completely unrelated to her own.
Her mentor was a managing partner at a venture capital firm.
Her first reaction was essentially: “Why was I matched with this person?”
The answer became clearer as the relationship developed. Her mentor regularly participated in decisions about hiring CEOs and evaluating leaders. He could help her think about her career from the perspective of the people making senior-level leadership decisions.
She would never have received that same perspective by talking only with people inside her management chain.
That is one of the advantages of cross-company mentoring. The best mentor is not necessarily someone who has followed the same path. Sometimes the greatest growth comes from someone who helps you see your career through an entirely different lens.
Expanding Your View Beyond One Company
Several of the women talked about how Menttium expanded their understanding of the professional world beyond the organizations where they worked.
Petere Miner who worked at Hewlett-Packard later became a mentor herself, supporting professionals from organizations including Ford, Pepsi, Mary Kay, and Cargill.
Those relationships offered a window into companies and industries she might otherwise never have encountered.
She discovered that while organizations may have different products, structures, and cultures, many leadership challenges are remarkably similar.
Leaders everywhere are trying to communicate effectively. They are navigating organizational dynamics, building relationships, making difficult decisions, influencing others, and figuring out how to lead authentically.
Exposure to different companies makes those patterns easier to see.
It also makes your own organization easier to understand.
When your entire professional frame of reference comes from one company, it can be difficult to distinguish between a universal leadership challenge and something unique to your organization’s culture. Cross-company mentoring provides a broader point of comparison.
Finding the Courage to Recognize Your Value
Mentoring can also create the space to think differently about what is possible.
Theresa Musser recalled how her Menttium experience gave her the courage to recognize what she was worth, understand the value of her skills, and ultimately create a new job description for herself.
That kind of confidence rarely comes from someone simply telling you to be more confident.
It develops through reflection, conversation, challenge, and perspective.
A mentor can help you identify strengths you have begun to take for granted. They can challenge assumptions about what you should do next. They can ask questions that help you articulate what you want rather than simply continuing along the path already in front of you.
For Deb Wible, Menttium helped enlarge her entire view of the world and for Marilyn, it provided the diversity of coaching she had been looking for. Lynne Bramlett feels Menttium helped her become more fully herself.
Different experiences, but a common result: greater clarity about who they were as leaders and what they could become.
Realizing You Are Not the Only One
There was another important realization within the group.
They were all struggling with some of the same things.
That discovery can be incredibly powerful for emerging and established leaders alike.
Inside an organization, leadership can sometimes feel isolating. People may assume everyone else has already figured out how to navigate uncertainty, difficult relationships, career decisions, executive communication, or organizational politics.
A mentoring community creates opportunities for more candid conversations.
You begin to see that capable, successful people across companies are often wrestling with many of the same questions.
That shared understanding builds confidence while creating space for honest learning.
Leadership Is Ultimately About People
Looking back on a long career at Hewlett-Packard, Lynne shared a lesson she wishes she had recognized earlier.
If she could live her career again, she would put more attention on relationships with people rather than focusing so heavily on producing results.
This is a powerful reflection.
Results matter, performance matters, expertise matters, but leadership is deeply human.
The ability to listen, build trust, understand different perspectives, communicate effectively, influence others, and invest in relationships becomes increasingly important as leadership responsibilities grow.
As Deb reflected, leadership requires the soft skills and people skills that help us understand situations from perspectives beyond our own.
Mentoring creates a place to develop exactly those capabilities.
The Relationship That Lasted Beyond the Program
Perhaps the most remarkable outcome of this Menttium experience was one that could never have been captured on a year-end program evaluation. These six incredible, successful, dedicated women have continued to meet on a quarterly basis for nearly 30 years!
Their Menttium experience became part of a much longer story of professional growth, shared wisdom, and connection.
Organizations invest in mentoring because they want to develop stronger leaders, retain high-potential talent, expand networks, and help employees navigate important career moments. Within the year of the program, companies see leadership growth, increased confidence, stronger decision making and increased career readiness (taking on positions with greater scope or authority).
What is remarkable is the long lasting transformation that extends beyond the formal program close.
- A mentor’s perspective influences a career decision years later.
- A lesson about relationships changes how someone leads.
- A connection becomes part of a lifelong professional network.
A group of women who met through a leadership development experience in 1998 is still gathering nearly three decades later. That is the lasting power of human connection. And it is a reminder that the value of mentoring is not always measured by what happens during the program. Sometimes its greatest impact is revealed over the course of a career.
Contact Us to join an upcoming cohort or to enroll others at your company.