26 Oct Growth mindset: Investing in Mentoring
Organizational change requires intentionality.
by Natalie Holder
Mentoring can be a game changer for anyone set on success. The key is to find mentors who create a relationship built on trust with their mentees. These are the people who will give you the “beyond the brochure” view of your organization and help you navigate its culture like a champ.
However, mentors—those with a natural affinity that encourages potential mentees to gravitate to them—are often controlled by emotion and unconscious bias. According to research conducted by the Center for Talent Innovation in 2019, 71 percent of mentors chose to guide protégés who share their race or gender. But women, African Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans—who I collectively refer to as historically underrepresented employees (HUEs) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)—make up less than 20 percent of STEM professionals. They face steep hurdles to finding a solid mentor. While most people can speak to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as values, very few are willing to invest the time and courage to put these values into practice.
At the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, our women’s employee resource group (ERG), Women@SLAC, understood this need and developed a comprehensive mentorship program. Over the course of a six-month commitment, a mentoring pair connect by telephone, virtual meeting, or in person for a minimum of 90 minutes per month. Launched in 2017, the program has since almost doubled in size. In 2021, 42 percent of participants shared that they had enjoyed a tangible job benefit—for instance, a promotion, salary increase, or competitive assignment—as a result of the mentoring program.
As the chief diversity officer at SLAC, I decided to partner with Women@SLAC and invest in training and growth of the mentors and mentees. Understanding that the ability to listen and respond to a mentee’s concerns and aspirations is crucial to the mentoring relationship, I introduced CoachDiversity Institute to Women@SLAC. The only International Coaching Federation–accredited program whose mission is to empower diverse communities through coaching, CoachDiversity provided training to better equip our mentors to ask probing questions that are transformational rather than transactional. We also created training for mentees to help them clarify their goals and desired outcomes and refine their preparation. The mentors and mentees expressed that the training sessions gave the mentoring program a more professional framework, with everyone having a stronger sense of their roles and responsibilities.
Organizational change requires intentionality. Since Women@SLAC was founded in 2016, SLAC has experienced a 50 percent increase in women in our science and technology roles. While I’m not stating causation, it is hard to deny that the strategic work of this ERG’s monthly programs and its mentorship program is correlated to women achieving more at SLAC. And since the creation of SLAC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office in 2021, there has been an incremental and steady increase in the hiring and advancement of HUEs at the lab. The combined force of the DEI office and Women@SLAC stands to positively disrupt the career trajectories for women of all different backgrounds at SLAC. DW
Natalie Holder leads the vision and strategy for SLAC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office and is the author of Exclusion: Strategies for Improving Diversity in Recruitment, Retention and Promotion (ABA Book Publishing, 2014).
