The Power of Mentorship: Elevating Women of Color in Leadership

As a successful woman of color, you’ve always been a self-driven achiever, climbing the ladder through your intelligence, personality, and ambition. Over the years, you’ve adopted the mindset, “It’s all on me. I can get it done myself.” While this attitude has served you well, imagine how much further and smoother your journey could be with the support of a mentor.

The New Paradigm of Mentoring

Today, a new paradigm of mentoring is emerging, demonstrating that it “takes a mentoring culture” and multiple mentors to help multicultural women grow into successful CEOs, leaders, and business owners. Although empirical evidence is still limited, anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly supports the benefits of mentoring for women of color.

Consider the career path of Stacy Blake-Beard, Ph.D., an associate professor of management at Simmons College in Boston. Her experiences as both a mentor and a protégée have shaped her career. In the late 1980s, while in graduate school, she was inspired by David Thomas, a young scholar at the Wharton School of Business, and developed a rapport with Faye Crosby, a social psychologist at Smith College.

“I felt so much more powerful having two very different people who acted as mentors and supported me,” she recalls. From Thomas, she learned to pursue her passions strategically. With Crosby, she gained an important role model, showing her how to balance family life with a successful academic career.

The Importance of a Mentoring Culture

For years, the business world has embraced mentoring for good reasons. “We already see the connections between mentoring and increased commitment to organizations, higher career satisfaction, more promotions, and higher salaries for women of color,” says Blake-Beard.

However, simply encouraging employees to seek out mentors may not be enough. Lois J. Zachary, Ph.D., president of Leadership Development Services, LLC, and bestselling author, contends that the most important challenge for organizations today is to create a “mentoring culture.” This is a mindset and practice in which a company deliberately and continuously fosters mentoring relationships and opportunities within the organization.

“Mentoring programs come and go; there’s a lack of sustainability there. But a mentoring culture will be supported and valued within the organization. Then, programs within that culture create a standard and consistency of mentoring practice that really works,” she says.

Unique Challenges for Women of Color

Despite the increasing numbers of diverse women involved in mentoring, there remains a dearth of multicultural women at the head of our nation’s boardroom tables. The challenges facing diverse women in business are different, according to Gwen Martin, Ph.D., and research director at the Center for Women’s Business Research in Washington, D.C.

“Women of color have a double challenge—gender and race/ethnicity—on top of the fact that, often, they are business owners trying to compete with larger businesses, firms that have been around much longer, and that may have more credibility in the marketplace,” she says.

The Changing Paradigm

As mentoring has become more established, the rules of the game have changed. “Once, a mentee was a passive receiver, sitting at the feet of their mentor to collect all the jewels as they fell from the mentor’s lips,” Zachary says. “The passive receiver has changed to a self-directed learner responsible for her own growth and advancement.”

Likewise, the mentor’s role has changed from that of “authority” to that of “facilitator.” “The mentor is no longer a sage, but a guide-on-the-side,” Zachary adds.

The Art of Choosing Mentors

When it comes to selecting mentoring partners, expert Lois Zachary offers some cautionary advice. “What’s really important in selecting a mentoring partner is to get the right learning fit. Focus on: what do I want to learn?”

For more insights on creating a mentoring culture, you can visit Mentoring Culture.