Janice Omadeke Shares Why Mentorship Is Critical in Hybrid Work

ELISE HU: That was Janice Omadeke, founder and CEO of the Mentor Method, an enterprise platform for mentorship. Later, we’ll hear from Sarah Haggard, who created a peer-to-peer mentoring platform, Tribute.

SARAH HAGGARD: Employers are still trying to run mentoring as a tops-down activity. And I’m here to tell you that that is no more. Employees want to be in control and own their own destiny.

ELISE HU: Both ladies will share their insights on what role mentorship plays in achieving workplace equity, and how companies can effectively establish mentoring programs, especially in the age of hybrid work. They also both started their companies in 2019, just before the pandemic made hybrid work ubiquitous, which means they each know a thing or two about a digital-first approach to relationship building. To kick things off, here’s my conversation with Janice.

ELISE HU: Thanks for joining us, Janice. This is going to be great.

JANICE OMADEKE: Thank you for having me.

ELISE HU: Let’s just start by having you discuss with us what mentorship means to you and how it has played a role in your life.

JANICE OMADEKE: Mentorship means not just getting a job but building a career. It’s using the expertise, advice, trials and tribulations of experts that have entered into your industry or have a certain set of skills that you admire, and being able to learn from those individuals to shape your own story, too. Personally, mentorship means a lot. I am first-generation American. My parents emigrated from the Congo back in the ’70s through college scholarships from missionaries, and growing up in the late ’80s early ’90s, it was with mentorship and guidance from complete strangers that helped my parents evolve in their careers and completely change my life.

ELISE HU: I mean, many of us have mentors. I think all of us stand on the shoulders of others. However, even though a lot of mentor-mentee relationships come about organically, it sounds like it doesn’t touch everyone. Not everybody has an equal opportunity to find a mentor that could really change their lives. Is that what you saw in business?

JANICE OMADEKE: Absolutely. There’s a view of mentorship that unless you send the right LinkedIn message at the right time and day, that this other individual reads it, or you’re at the right watercooler, as in the right event on the right team, working on the right floor for the companies that are returning to work, your chances of meeting a mentor, if you don’t have that perfect alignment across what I just described, becomes slim to none. We forget that not everybody has the same access to resources, mentors, and leveling up their skill set and education. So when I was in defense contracting—that’s where I spent the bulk of my career—any time I signed up for corporate mentorship programs, I was just matched to the only woman or minority executive that was available. The basis of those matches were really just age, race, gender, and maybe we were both on the communications team, or this individual also worked on the 17th floor where I was working, for example. And that’s not enough to actually build a streamlined and successful relationship.

ELISE HU: What was the origin story of the Mentor Method?

JANICE OMADEKE: So growing up in the late ’80s, early ’90s, we had very little money. My dad was working several jobs, my mom was staying home with us. And my dad had a chance encounter with this gentleman who sponsored him on the spot to participate in a workforce development tech literacy program, and went from part-time jobs with no upward mobility to getting a security clearance and working in IT at the Pentagon, which completely changed our lives from a two-bedroom apartment with six people, one bathroom in not the best part of town, to a five-bedroom home with a yard and a good school district. So as a byproduct of mentorship, I’ve seen its effects. I’ve seen the power behind it. So when I was at a large management consulting company as a manager, my creative director asked me to build a mentorship program for about 150 people, virtually on top of my 70-hour-plus work week. I immediately looked online for solutions that wouldn’t repeat the issues that I experienced. So when I looked online at the incumbents, they really weren’t fitting the bill. It was sort of a clunky interface, they weren’t providing streamlined matches, the system was overpriced. And so I just used my background in product graphic design and web design and built something really just for my team, because I knew that they deserved a better process than what I was seeing in-market. So I started working on it nights and weekends, left my very comfortable management consulting job in 2018, moved to Austin for the Mass Challenge Accelerator, and the rest is really history.

ELISE HU: You’ve listed some of the bigger obstacles in the existing corporate mentorship landscape. What might be ways that individuals could find a mentor or create that kind of relationship, whether it’s approaching someone or building a mentor-mentee relationship over time?

JANICE OMADEKE: So if you’re in a structured internal corporate mentorship program, I honestly think that’s one of the best approaches because you have a clear start and end date. You know the objective of the program, you know that these mentors have been vetted and approved by leadership to be impactful mentors. My advice is always keep it organized but casual. So have a clear idea of what you want to work on. I think sometimes people believe that mentorship is just a catchall, but, you know, you could get ready for a promotion. You could refine a specific skill set, and knowing exactly what you want to work on and why, and then finding mentors whose strengths align with those. So let’s say you’re a mid-level consultant for a large management consulting firm and you want to refine your financial modeling, and you want to broaden your network to get on different projects. So you take it upon yourself to introduce yourself to a few partners, senior managers, and other people that are on projects that you want to work on. Just asking them, How did you get onto this project? won’t give you the exact alignment for how you can do the same thing. So you really want to go deeper than that and say, Okay, these are the areas that I would love to have an informational discussion with you around, to learn how I can begin evolving in those specific skill sets. My goal is to reach X, Y, and Z competency over the next six months. That’s just an informational conversation. But allow that person to say if they have availability, what that availability is like. And if they don’t, that’s okay, too. But you don’t want to go in and just assume that everybody wants to be your mentor.

ELISE HU: One thing I’ve noticed is that, this conversation so far, we’ve really focused on the mentee, the person who’s seeking mentorship. What are ways that mentoring someone else can be beneficial to the person who is being a mentor?

JANICE OMADEKE: Well, studies have shown that being a mentor helps you get promoted five times faster. So there is data to show that mentorship is actually more advantageous for the mentor.

ELISE HU: Wow. And what are some of the biggest obstacles that people face when they are a mentor, they’re mentoring someone? And how could they overcome those?

JANICE OMADEKE: There’s a pressure to be everything for everyone, but I think that can get heightened when you are someone’s mentor. There is the pressure to appear as perfect, which is the opposite of mentorship. You want to share where you’ve failed and where you’ve triumphed and be very vulnerable and real with your experience.

ELISE HU: Yeah, that makes sense. So you talked about the benefits for both the mentor and the mentee of this relationship. What are the ingredients in a successful, ongoing mentorship relationship?

JANICE OMADEKE: There’s a reason why the Mentor Method’s values are trust, honesty, communication, and transparency. That’s the requirement for anyone on our team because that’s a requirement for a successful mentor-mentee relationship. In addition to chemistry, vulnerability, and a willingness to learn. That learning mindset, and coming in without any shred of ego as a mentor or mentee, is really when you’re able to see that magic connection happen through being vulnerable and sharing their experiences.

ELISE HU: Obviously the landscape of work has changed dramatically in the last two years. So I’m curious how the hybrid working model, and just not being in the same geographic locations, affects mentoring programs.

JANICE OMADEKE: They shouldn’t. I mean, what we saw through the last two-plus years is that you can build connections without needing to be in the same physical space, regardless of the location.

ELISE HU: What are some other points making the case that businesses should take mentorship programs seriously?

JANICE OMADEKE: Yes, so we approach that in two ways. First one is retention, and the savings and costs associated with that. The second is winning in the market. Companies that have structured mentorship programs outperform their peers by 35 percent, because your employees are bought into the company culture. They feel connected to the mission and growth of that organization. They then want to share their innovative ideas with your leadership, which means that you’re now thinking ahead of where the market is. That’s really where the innovation comes from. The CEO of a company has the vision and a lot of great ideas, the C-suite will bring a lot to the table, but oftentimes it’s the program manager that’s been with the company for less than two years, with a fresh lens on the direction of the company, that might have a cool new feature or an idea that really takes the company above and beyond. And what we forget is that these HR teams that are responsible for implementing mentorship programs across companies are also facing the great resignation while trying to retain hundreds of thousands of employees for these companies. But what they’ve seen with structured mentorship programs, especially with the Mentor Method, is that they’re able to reduce churn by 5 percent and see over $100 million in retention savings annually just by implementing a tool like the Mentor Method.

ELISE HU: Wow. Janice, I want to give you a chance to talk about one of your own mentors that you want to shout out and what that relationship has meant to you personally.

JANICE OMADEKE: I would love to shout out Gwen Houston. She is the former head of diversity, equity, and inclusion globally for Microsoft. And to know Gwen is to be in awe of her. She has helped me refine so many approaches with our solution, broadening my network, and has been a true sounding board for me as a Black woman executive. She knows the hurdles and barriers and challenges that I face on a daily basis. And having her as a sounding board has just helped me get through a lot of those hang-ups and just continue building the best company possible.

ELISE HU: Janice Omadeke, that was great. Thank you so much.

JANICE OMADEKE: My pleasure. Thank you so much.

ELISE HU: So far we’ve heard how having a strong mentor, or being a strong mentor, can be an integral part of a fulfilling, successful career. We’ve also learned how companies can establish effective mentoring programs for their employees. Next up, our correspondent Desmond Dickerson chats with Sarah Haggard, CEO of Tribute, a peer-to-peer mentoring app leveraging technology to foster more meaningful relationships at work.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Sarah, thanks so much for joining us today.

SARAH HAGGARD: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

DESMOND DICKERSON: So as we’re all experiencing this hybrid and remote work experiment, Gen Z in particular, you know, they’ve never known what we would refer to maybe as a normal working world. So what is mentorship like for them in such a dynamic and experimental environment?

SARAH HAGGARD: For Gen Z, they grew up in a world where they were digital natives. They grew up in a world where access to information was so native and natural to them that I think they just expect that they will be able to learn through mentors. It’s how they learn. They crowdsource information. They ask deep questions. They learn through others very naturally, and they do it on their digital devices. But I think the most interesting thing about Gen Z is they are coming into the workforce with the least amount of social capital of any other generation in the workforce. And I say that because they don’t walk into an office where they get greeted by a bunch of people. And a lot of them have spent the last two years doing college remote. I think it’s something that companies need to really be eyes wide open about and think about how they’re going to create opportunities for this generation to build that capital, which ultimately becomes their avenue to navigating their careers.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Let’s talk a little bit about, where do companies tend to go wrong when they set up mentorship programs?

SARAH HAGGARD: I want to start by saying that I think if your company is trying to do it, give them kudos. I think where companies go wrong in this is that they don’t think about the scale challenge of, Okay, even if I set up a spreadsheet or set up an intranet site where people can go sign up, that tends to not scale across the organization. And that’s also limiting because you create all these sub-communities and the organization doesn’t get to benefit from the collective knowledge-wisdom of the whole. The other thing that I see most frequently is employers are still trying to run mentoring as a tops-down activity. And I’m here to tell you that that is no more. Employees want to be in control and own their own destiny. They want to own how they connect. Start thinking about how you can run this bottoms-up, that’s employee driven, that steps the org out of the way and lets your employees really connect in those moments of need. That’s the future of mentorship.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Right, right. What role does mentorship play in establishing equity or equality among different types of employees?

SARAH HAGGARD: Yeah. Tribute’s mission is really to equalize and flatten the hierarchy. And we absolutely believe in lateral mentorship, reverse mentorship, all different directions of mentorship. And that’s based on our thesis that everybody has something to give and get at all points in our career. I think a lot of us talk about reverse mentoring, like, yeah, it’s the hot new thing, but it’s really nothing more than an acknowledgment that we’re all lifelong learners, including at the top.

ELISE HU: That was Desmond Dickerson and CEO of Tribute, Sarah Haggard. And that’s it for this episode of the WorkLab podcast from Microsoft. Check out the WorkLab digital publication, too, where you can find, among many other things, a transcript of this very episode. That is all at Microsoft.com/WorkLab. And for this podcast, please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. Those ratings make a big difference. The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produced this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thanks for listening.