Name: Fortune's MPW Mentorship's Most Successful Women
Uploaded: 2019-12-11
Duration: 16 min 26 s
Description: Meet the women who have connected and changed lives for the better.

Hi, everybody! So, Lara, you was a mentee on Fortune's global mentoring program in 2010. She came from Jordan and she had three mentors, Carol Bartz who was the CEO of Yahoo, Judy Olian who was the dean at UCLA, and [ UNKNOWN ] who was a partner at [ UNKNOWN ]. Lara, what were you doing then in your career and what are you doing now? Well I joined the, I was fortunate enough to be selected in 2010 to attend the mentoring programme and at the time I was working, I was running a digital news room of Duodents first independent news paper and when I was selected, I decided to. Development to this experience, and when I came back, there was a lot of new beginnings for me mainly I started an NGO to focus on women empowerment to increase, to remove the structural barriers that were holding women back from entering the workforce and staying there. And I also went into television. I pursued video journalism which I was very keen on and so I came into it was more of a like going from inwards all about me and when I came back from the mentoring program it was about outwards, looking at everything around me and all the women around me and Paying attention to needs other than myself. Great. Laura, what did a typical day look like with your mentors? It was fascinating. I had three mentors. They had a lot of things in common, but they had a lot of things that were different. So the common thing about my mentors with that they were. They would act and not react. So they would see something in my personality and they would change my program to fit it. They were connectors they expanded my network just like Michael voices did. They connected me immediately with 33 women from around the world that fascinated me, and they were mentees emerging leaders. And so there was an experience there. And there was also they would like, look into our weaknesses or challenges and they were connectors. So we would go out for dinner. And I would find myself sitting next to, at least let's say, and then I would realize why am I sitting there? Why is my name next release? And then when I was talking with the least I would realize that haha I had shared this challenge with my mentor this morning. So she put me next to this lady because she thought that this lady could help me. Of course six in the morning I would be running to the gym with one of them. The other one would take me around Pasadena on a bike, and she was like 20 years older than me and I couldn't keep up with her. And I would like to be so embarrassed like this is part of her lifestyle. And one of my mentors was, so I was about to get married that year, so, I would ask her about how she connected with her kids with such a busy work life balance. And she said, you see that tree top, tree house over there in my back yard? I built it with them. I was like but you're a lawyer, I was like how did you do that? She said, I read, I studied And I figured it out and I made it happen. I connected with my kids using our hand, using the soil. Of course Carol Bartz was, she was an amazing woman. She had a she had a treadmill in her office, and she spoke with all Yahoo members this one day over the Skype And whatever they use them, and she showed me how she can speak to thousands of people and get what she wanted. And one of the most important things you taught me was, if you go into a meeting and you find five people leave, nothing is gonna come out of that meeting. [ LAUGH ] Run. So and she was serious. The one common denominator of their resilience was that they were all cancer survivors. And they made it a point that it was insignificant in pursuing their career. They made me feel that they literally described their [ UNKNOWN ] sessions. They like one of them would walk me up to a picture and say, you see this picture here? I had just come back from a chemo session. And then I had this group picture and I was standing upright and nobody knew my situation. And other one told me, I would go into my chemo session, go back to my meeting, and sorry, if I needed to vomit I'd go back to the bathroom Wipe it away and go back into my meeting. And this is someone that has never been exposed to this. And I looked at them and I said, they are so resilient, they're fit. They're focused, they're authentic, they're real. They're committed and they're consistent. And they really don't wanna thank you for me. They didn't even expect me to thank them. They just wanted what was best for me. And they were able to share all their knowledge with me without any hesitation. Yeah. Wow. I'd love to hear from Cathy a little bit about your experience as a mentor. What made you initially want to be a mentor? And how did you manage that commitment? So how many in this audience are here for the first time by show of hands? Wow. So in 2008, I was sitting in your seats. And I heard from a number of priormentees like Laura about their experiences, and I was shocked and amazed at what a short period of time mentoring could do to change people's lives not only their lives but the way they paid it back in their countries. So it's like the adjusted justice Stewart 1964 tests for obscenity You know what, when you see it, and that's what drove me to mentoring. Great. And can you tell us a little bit about how you split that up? So I first thought it might be pretty daunting so of course when I heard people like Laura speak, I thought, well, this is something I'd really like to do. I'd like to use whatever power and influence I have to make more of a difference in the world. But I thought, I'm busy. It's 2008. I'm leading a global law firm, that's when the economy was starting to exit the the legal market and And I thought who's gonna be excited to be stuck with a lawyer through this program? And so I was here with Susan Wojcicki and this is preCEO of YouTube days and Megan Smith and this is before she became the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. And we were all taking the same thing. We've loved to do this, but we can't do it alone. So the three of us actually teamed and co mentored that first year. And then even then, due to your point, Laura about not reacting but acting. Even then I thought, if I just have this person watch me in the legal environment or in the law firm leadership environment, they're not gonna get out of this program what they want to get out of this program. So what I did was I connected into the women in Silicon Valley, some of whom were in this room like melon yen, and we came up with group mentoring and we would host dinners we would bring in and Winblad, Heidi Roizen Kelly McElhaney people to come in and help depending on whatever issue or challenge the mentee had. We would have strategy sessions we would my first mentee was Susan Rebecca from South Africa. And remember Susan, Susan gave up her pension to start an orphanage. And she ended up having 250 children in her in her orphanage. But she wasn't sustainable. So we had a session and we talked about how we could connect her into the Oprah net work and how she could have her orphanage. The women who work there. Make clothing and how They could make items and become sustainable so they didn't have to rely on donations. So that's the kind of work that we did. And it wasn't just me it was, with the fortune name and the State Department and Vital Voices. You can get a lot of people together and really make it a rich and rewarding experience, not only for the mentee, but for yourselves as well. Alyse, what are some other memorable ways that mentors have brought mentees into their lives whether at work or at home? Well, I can tell you, it is never what you expected to be. I mean you hear from Lara and from Kathy, it's nothing short of transformational. And I think one of the most powerful things about this program is that it shows these rising entrepreneurs and business leaders that Leadership is not what you thought it was. It is not the person maybe that you see leading a country. It is about seeking power using power platform voice to empower and that's why I think they always go back and do extraordinary things and thinking of Maria Hodge, Maria Gabriella Hodge from Argentina. She was mentored and went back. One of the earliest mentees went back and has trained and mentored 11, 000 women in the 12 years since she was mentored. Maria Pacheco in Guatemala actually started working with her mentor. Kathy Calvin who was the head of the UN Foundation. So mentors also come from many different sectors. I will actually tell all of you, it is like the bad **** women's club. [ LAUGH ] So you don't have to be the CEO of a company. But it's women who understand this idea, that we lead differently. And we lead wanting to have that legacy because for the 338 women who have been mentored over the last 14 years of this program, it has impact the lives of millions. And I can tell you that full stop because of all the follow on programs and initiatives that have been launched because these women go back and change. And they realize, yeah, I've got to empower others. Right. Do we have any questions in the room? No. Okay, we can keep going. We gotta give pad [ UNKNOWN ] sellers. [ LAUGH ] He has Patty. [ APPLAUSE ] Patty is a founder of this program. I think it's so powerful because it is a public private partnership between- Cofounder. Okay, cofounder. Cofounder, yes. Dina Pal. Dina Pal. When she was at the state apartment and then we quickly [ UNKNOWN ] Invited you in on the day two [ INAUDIBLE ] yes. Great. If I can, I've got a great story about Patty, so [ LAUGH ] I told her I would call her out in the audience today. So So, my first year I had mentored Susan Rumac, is I mentioned you had an orphanage in South Africa, and later that year I did not know Patty, but I was at All Things Digital, and I had a file and was stuck in my room. And Patty said, well, let's just meet for lunch after the conference. And we met, and Patty said, I really want you to go to the Global Forum, the Fortune Global Forum that's in South Africa. And I looked at my schedule and I said, I've got speaking engagements. I can't make this work. And then I thought, Patty, if you come with me to Johannesburg and go to the orphanage and write about the orphanage and then we drive this bus, that Megan Smith and Susan Wojcicki and I fundraise for Susan, if you drive that to the global forum, that all go to the global forum. Three weeks later. Three weeks later, [ LAUGH ] Three weeks later [ LAUGH ] and so we did that and we brought Susan to the global forum. We actually, we brought this bus that we had purchased with the help of a lot of people in Silicon Valley. We plastered it with pictures of the mentorship program of the orphanage. And parked it right in front of where Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu, all of these people [ LAUGH ] were coming in. We were literally on the road 23 hours from Johannesburg to Cape Town, and We called and Mulcahy remember that or Ursula Burns. Ursula Burns from Xerox to get these signs [ CROSSTALK ] CEO of Xerox at the time because we wanted to get a big sign for the side of the bus. Chill and they ended up helping us. They did. And then Google Maps was really just this was. They were tracking it. Megan Smith had Google Maps was tracking our boy. Google was helping us like tracking us on Google Maps and it makes the entrepreneurial. And we ended up putting Susan front center at the global forum and spreading the word about this wonderful program. Yeah, so [ UNKNOWN ]. Cathy. [ APPLAUSE ] Cathy. I think, we've been [ UNKNOWN ] so important about this program is that you as a mentor are just as transformed as the mentee's I have right here, you all wondered; Why does she come on stage with her purse. [ LAUGH ] This is the Kathy Clutch, named after this woman because it was made by her mentee. She was so impacted by that, and we all bought a Kathy Clutch. [ LAUGH ] And I'll just say, there's even a bigger story here that So Menaul quit her job where she was serving other people and decided that the way in Morocco to empower women and to give them power, even within their personal relationships in their household was to give them jobs. If they had money, they had power. So she started a seal of luxury and started a high end purse company. You can go online. A high end purse company and all of these purses are made by rural women in Morocco and it was just phenomenal what she's doing to transform the world into a country. [ UNKNOWN ] loves this. Lara, what did you get out of the program? [ LAUGH ] Not the purse. I wanna buy- Not the purse, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll have a larpers The first thing I got out of the program was a sense of purpose. Where I was going so I was like a loose cannon. I had so much energy I would like a bullet. I didn't know I have any definition to my energy I, wanted something but I didn't find anyone to guide me and the program from the minute you land in The US until you finish you I think Michael voices like it puts it in a way that you will meet different experiences just fight before you meet your mentors like we had a weekend in Washington and every single person played a role in shaping this mentoring experience. For example, There was Han Valerie who had just survived, she was a mentee. She had just survived the Haiti earthquake and she literally survived because she left a meeting that she was in to meet her husband. And everyone in the meeting had died because she just crossed out and then everyone, that earthquake took place and she survived. So she was on the bus, we're going to this gala dinner in DC And I was like, You look amazing. Look, you look fantastic. How do you do it? And she looked at me, she said, this is not a rehearsal. This is it. You either live and enjoy every moment because you might lose it in a second. And then we went to the gala dinner and there was Beth Brooke, who was at the time working for Ernst and Young. She was also a mentor. And I had we all came with vulnerabilities. And we were very transparent. So I asked her, listen, I'm really bad at delegating. So how can I overcome that? I'm always worried that no one will give me the quality that I am used to giving. So she said I was the same thing. She acknowledged my weakness and she said But someone trusted you one time, someone trusted what you were doing so you need to trust 80 % of anyone that gives you work and work with them without imposing yourself to improve them. And then there was Amiri slaughters, who I'm sure all of you know You're at the State Department because I was part of the program and she said, I was about to think of, you know, getting married and worried about my career and the work life balance. And that's why I started my NGO. And I told her and she asked, she said, asked her, What about work life balance, and she said something, all these things that I'm telling you are things that I practice every day and she said Family comes first, what comes together? Not second. And so when I came back there was sense of purpose. It was, I removed it from my life and it became about the we, the you, the, the other people. For me, the most rewarding thing about leadership was that My mentors, they showed me, did not tell me, did not impose and I decided that this should be my leadership way. And I keep improving and just last year [ UNKNOWN ] hooked me with another mentor from Johnson & Johnson. Great, I think Laura that's all the time we have. Yeah. Input. Thank you all so much for talking about this program, [ LAUGH ] And you can talk forever. [ APPLAUSE ] If you have if you have any questions about how to sign up, come ask Elise or Fortam. Thank you [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Fortune's MPW Mentorship's Most Successful Women

Leadership

Meet the women who have connected and changed lives for the better.