Former Well Fargo VP & Bethel Biz Mentorship Program Director, Linda Goodwin, gives us her experiences creating a college level mentorship program and the lessons she’s learned along the way. We discuss how she works to make a sure successful mentorship really does occur with current students and alumni. Her advice is a great place to start when considering how to prepare yourself to be mentored or when choosing a program for mentorship.
Welcome to Business Talk Sister Gawk! I’m Bekkah and I’m Ruthie and today’s episode title is, “What makes a Successful Mentorship.” Today with us we have Linda Goodwin! She spent the majority of her career at Wells Fargo. She was a senior vice president and manager in the Corporate Treasury Management Business Line. After 31 years she retired to pursue volunteer opportunities and to serve in ways that had a meaningful impact.
Linda launched the Bethel Biz Mentorship Program at Bethel University in 2013 and serves as the director of the program. Linda also serves on the Bethel board of trustees and the Bethel’s Foundation Board of Governors. In addition, she is active at her church, Eagle Brook, as a women’s small group leader, a kids ministry volunteer, and she serves on Eagle Brook’s board. She has three sons all married and two grandchildren ages 22 – or sorry eight – no, that was wrong. Ages two and 22 months! I was just saying, “Wow, that’s a big stretch!” She adores spending lots of time with them. Thank you so much for being here with us today!
Linda: Thank you for having me! I’m really excited to talk about mentorship because it is something I’m very passionate about.
How to Define Mentorship
Bekkah: Yeah, and for context to everyone else, I met Linda quite a few years ago when she actually interviewed me for the Bethel Biz Program. I met her after she was already in her volunteering stage of life and that was just such a pleasure to get to know you in that. Our first question for you is how would you define mentorship?
Linda: Sure! Great question, you know, when people think about mentorship, I mean it really is broad. It can be formal, informal, short-term, long-term or it can have a really specific focus like a career focus or a spiritual focus or maybe like a mentor for figuring out how to launch a business but generally, if you think about mentorship: it is a mutually beneficial relationship between two people where a senior or more experienced individual invests time, shares their experiences, their expertise, with another more junior individual for purposes of learning and development.
What Are The Benefits & Impacts That Mentorship Has?
Ruthie: Okay, what impact does mentorship have on those individuals? You were talking about the two people that are mutually benefited.
Linda: Sure, when I launched the Mentorship Program one of the things I did was I looked at the research because I wanted to be able to articulate to the students at Bethel as well as our mentors that we recruited what is the benefit of mentorship and what is the impact that it can have.
The research showed that the mentees report a higher level of confidence, greater achievement, and an increased commitment to learning and growing. They carry that on through not just the time of mentorship but throughout their life.
Linda: Mentors report the impact of – Gosh! They get new insights by hearing and spending time with those who are younger than them and they develop relationships and sometimes get challenged with some of their own beliefs. They get a lot of just personal satisfaction about when they can help someone reach their own potential. I thought it would be interesting for me to share with you just a couple areas of feedback from some of the students in our current program because we’re getting ready to market it for this year’s students who will participate in the fall.
How Students Have Been Impacted By Mentorship
Linda: We asked some of them, “Hey, tell us what is what does mentorship mean to you? What have you learned this year?” I’m just going to read a couple of those statements. One student said, “The Mentorship Program is by far the most impactful aspect of my college education. The knowledge connections and relationships I gained through Bethel Biz were incomparable to anything I learned in a classroom.”
I have heard that from other students in the past but they always tell me, “Don’t tell my professors that I said that though!” Another student said, “My two mentor placements have been excellent, helping me grow not just in my business network and exposure but also personally and spiritually. I highly recommend that driven students seeking personal or professional growth participate in mentorship.”
Another student said, “Bethel Biz was one of my greatest blessings during my time at Bethel. It gave me the opportunity to build a professional and personal relationship with someone who has been in the same shoes as me before. God has a mission for each of us and my mentor was able to meet me where I was at while helping me become the person he has called me to be.”
How Mentors Have Been Impacted By Mentorship
Those are all students and then I had a couple of our mentors tell me that “Mentorship is an opportunity to encourage, empower, and give hope to future leadership of our organizations and our country!” Another mentor said, “It’s always uplifting to have a conversation with our future leaders. It’s truly inspirational.” You can tell the impact is broad but there’s a lot of inspiration and passion and just appreciation for the relationship that develops.
What Inspired You To Create Bethel University’s Mentorship Program?
Bekkah: Yeah so why did you start looking into creating the Mentorship Program, originally? What inspired you to get there?
Linda: You know, I can’t take credit! I was about six months away from retiring and the chair of the Business Department at Bethel called me and said, “Hey, Linda, there’s a couple alumni who have created this vision where they want to do a better job with our alumni. They want to connect alumni to alumni and have opportunities for them let’s say over breakfast,” Reconnect, share, and learn from each other but they also wanted to connect alumni back to Bethel, back to the students through mentorship. So he asked me if I would join the Bethel Biz board and then launch a Mentorship Program.
Linda: Basically, create it, launch it, and take it from there. I honestly just felt like that was totally God saying, “Hey, here’s what you are doing next.” And I had benefited from many mentors throughout my career and I felt like this was such a great opportunity to give back because I knew it was something that would have long lasting impact on both mentors and mentees. I didn’t – like I said, I can’t take credit for the idea to launch a Mentorship Program but I was happy to step into that role.
How to Create a Mentorship Program
Ruthie: Okay, how did you go about creating your Mentorship Program?
Linda: Well, the first thing I did is just do lots of research. It was amazing how much I could find. I specifically researched “University Mentorship Programs” because once you start doing research on mentorship I mean there are all sorts of Mentorship Programs at all ages of life. I focused pretty heavily on you know undergrad university programs. I did look at some graduate programs and I looked at St. Thomas and the U of M but I looked at Harvard. I looked at Stanford. I was fortunate to have a connection with the director of Gustavus‘s program. They had launched theirs a couple years before us and she just was a wealth of information. I’m so grateful to her because she completely opened up everything that they had done, what was working, and some of the changes that they were making.
Linda: For the first few years as we continued to evolve our program she was a great resource. I also leveraged the Mentorship Programs that I was involved with at Wells Fargo. I was also a part of a Program called Menttium where in the early part of my career where I got matched with professionals. Then I basically used all of that research and then I just got to work and wrote a mentorship handbook, created the mentor and mentee applications, and then we launched the program five months later.
How to Match Mentors and Mentees Together
Bekkah: Yeah and I’m gonna be honest, I think I was probably one of the very first or second batch of people to go through the program and I remember you interviewing me for it and thinking to myself. “Oh, snap like this is serious stuff!” Because you asked some really hard questions for the interview process. What do you think was key at the beginning of interviewing people and saying, “This is to match them together”? How did you go about deciding this is going to work?
Interview The Mentees & Don’t Just Rely on Their Application
Linda: Well, yeah you know that match process – and this actually was something that Gustavus had shared with me. When they first rolled out their program, they just had the students and the mentors complete an application and they didn’t do any interviewing but they found out that can result in some poor matches. The example they shared with me is they had a student who on paper just looked outstanding. I mean you know top student, very articulate responses to the application, and they wanted to make sure that they had a really great student to match with this kind of high-powered CEO. Well, the match was a disaster.
Ruthie: Awh!
Make Sure Mentor and Mentee Understand The Commitment
Linda: Yeah, and she said it was because this CEO was like, “Go, go, go,” and he was very extroverted and pretty hard-driving, and the student though, a really top student, she was very much an introvert and very timid and just got totally overwhelmed. It just didn’t work and so because of that, I said, “Yeah, I am going to interview, even though it is a lot, but I’m going to personally interview for 10 to 15 minutes, all of the students,” and part of it was just really to get a sense for the personality and to get to know and to make sure that they understood the commitment. Because you want both the mentor and the mentee have to be committed to it.
Connect With Every Mentor to Find a Good Mentee Fit
Then when I meet with mentors, I know the majority of all university programs do not meet in person with the mentors, but I like to get to know them as well. Whatever I can. I’ll meet them for coffee really spend a half-hour, 45 minutes, and get to know them and get to hear about what they’re looking for in a student who would be a good match. That’s an important part of that. I’ve had to learn that though I have an, unfortunately, this tendency for perfection – I’ve had to learn that, no, I’m not going to be able to always have 100% perfect matches. Because we’re human! But I just try and be really intentional and spend a lot of time on that match.
How to Keep Mentor and Mentees Engaged Throughout The Mentorship
Ruthie; Okay so what do you think are some things that you’ve discovered, some insights you have about how to keep mentors and mentees engaged through the program?
Linda: Yeah, you know we emphasize that in order to have a really good mentorship you need to get to know each other personally so try not to just keep it so focused on the professional side that it just gets stiff right. Then you just kind of run out of questions. Actually one of the questions now we ask the students during the interview process is, “What do you do if you’re not feeling a strong connection with your mentor?” and I ask that question because I don’t want them to just give up if they don’t feel like they’ve got something in common or if they’re not in the career that they think they should be.
We’ve learned that it’s important to emphasize that point and to give them ideas about how to find some common connections and get to know them as an individual and about family and interests. Then, secondly, we really talk about the importance of being extremely intentional and take it seriously. The Program is mentee-driven, meaning the students need to own scheduling that monthly meeting really thinking about “what do I want to learn in this discussion?” and “what am I struggling with?” or whatever it is.
It can be so broad and every student needs to make it their own but be intentional about preparing for that meeting, send the mentor, and an email, a text ahead of time saying, “Hey, here’s what I want to talk about.” That gives the mentor an opportunity to prepare and be thoughtful and then finally we just added some core values to the Program a couple years ago that are intentionality, transparency, and accountability. Those are the three values that we really emphasize that are so important to have to be engaged and to have a really strong mentorship. Being open and on honest. Be intentional and then hold each other accountable to the mentorship.
How Can a Mentee Maximize Their Mentorship Time?
Bekkah: Yeah, so how does a good mentee prepare for mentorship? I know you kind of touched on those things of open and honest but are there like any administrative things that they can do to be more prepared or how do they maximize that time?
Linda: Sure, yeah. We put together – this is another kind of insight we learned – we added training to the program so before the mentees meet their mentor we do some training and prepare a handbook for them and give them lots of topic ideas. One of the things that we talk about is research your mentor. Look on LinkedIn look at their profile. Look at the companies that they’ve worked at. Look at some of the – specifically, research a little bit of about the companies that they work with and the type of jobs that they’ve done. Use that to kind of drive some of your questions to maybe understand why do they make some of these career changes.
Linda: Do the homework using LinkedIn and then just, again, the other part of that preparation and we ask the students before they meet with their mentor to think about all of the goals that they have for the year. It can start broad and then they can work through it but based on kind of the year of the student a sophomore versus a junior versus a senior will have different goals but if they know they want to work on interviewing skills and how to stand out in an interview write that down. If they want to work on their resume, if they want to learn how once they start their job how do they really differentiate themselves? Maybe they want to work on communication skills. Maybe they want to you know learn how to better network and how to grow their network.
Linda: But all those things, the preparation around just really making it yours and thinking through what you want to learn, what are your goals, and think forward to the end of the year. By the end of the year what am I going to feel good about if I learn this year? Really putting some thought and time into it.
How Much Experience Should a Mentor Have Before Mentoring?
Ruthie: Okay and how much experience do you think that someone should have to be – before they can really be a good mentor?
Linda: We typically require like four years experience post their undergrad degree. For the most part that works pretty well, but I have had a couple students who were only two years out and said, “Hey, I know I could be a good mentor and I’d love to do it and I want to give back,” so in a couple instances we’ve done that but for the most part we like to see graduates have at least four years in the corporate world and from there we’ve got a wide bandwidth of experience and expertise.
Is It Important for a Mentor to Be Similar in Personality or Interests?
Ruthie: How important is it to have someone that’s pretty similar in your character traits and things that they’re interested in in those people who you were seeking out as mentors?
Linda: I mean it’s kind of interesting because from a student’s perspective a lot of times they think but that’s the most important thing. Now I’ll tell you when I’m doing the matches, I first start on gender and all the research I did shows that in a university program matching same gender works the best. It just allows for more transparency and openness but secondly, then I do match on the career interest of the student and the career field or experience of the mentor.
Linda: However, I don’t always have a perfect match like that. It’s interesting I’ve asked several students like, “What do you think makes a good mentor?” and all the responses that I get have nothing to do with the career field of the mentor. They’ll talk about, “It’s someone who’s willing to admit their own failures and shortcomings. That makes them more relatable,” or, “it’s someone who values the relationship and realizes the gravity of what it means to be looked up to and giving advice.”
Linda: Or you know someone else told me, he said, “You know, a good mentor is someone who listens first, thinks second, and speaks last, always eager to help.” Then I love what this one student told me. He said, “A good mentor is willing and open to share failures as readily as successes. They have candid honesty, integrity, and respect. They are invested and interested in my story even when I think it’s unremarkable.” And I thought. “Oh, I love that!” But as you can hear in those responses, I mean, I tell the students, “You think you know the field that you’re going to go into you know when you’re a junior or a senior, and so many times your career ends up somewhere else!” Just keeping an open mind and curious mind and realize that you can learn from anybody. Now I’m not going to pair an accounting student with an HR professional typically, right? I really do try to make those matches make sense so that they can learn very specific things. Especially, when they’re they’re very focused on certain careers.
How Many Mentors Should You Have at a Time in Your Life?
Ruthie: You kind of mentioned how you go through and pair people but how many mentors do you think would be wise to have at a time? It maybe sounds like not a million because you’re pairing one on one.
Linda: Right! Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this program it’s a one-on-one mentorship but as you go through life, because what we really hope is that the students recognize the value of mentorship and will continue to seek out mentors throughout their life. I know lots of people – they may have one that’s more career-focused and that helps them really make decisions around kind of career changes and what they’re going through and also to help kind of balance the work-life side of that.
Linda: Or maybe as you think about once you get into a career, gosh how do you deal with conflict in the workplace? I mean there’s so much value in having a mentor to be able to talk through that but you can also have a spiritual mentor. Or you could have one that’s maybe more short-term. If you’re thinking specifically about being an entrepreneur and starting your own business you might want someone for a certain season in your life where you’re just specifically reaching out to those and they could be, again, maybe somebody for a year or two where you’re interested in a very specific topic that you want to learn about. But for the most part, maybe two or three mentors in your career, but not probably more than that.
Bekkah: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here with us today and we’re gonna put the links the Bethel Program and everything in the blog is there any other way if someone wanted to reach out to you any guidance you could give them is there a way they could do that?
Linda: Yes, they definitely could do that. You have my email and you can certainly use that. I’d be happy to just help anybody who’s looking to either start a Mentorship Program or want to talk about resources. But you can also use the Bethel Biz site. The link that I sent you.
