Isabella Fu: Managing Outside Your Comfort Zone
Throughout 2005, five leading attorneys shared their thoughts about mentoring with Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr., the founder of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, and publisher emeritus of Diversity & the Bar® magazine. This is the last article that will be written this year on the topic of mentoring across differences—spotlighting how lawyers of different racial, gender, and cultural backgrounds build successful mentoring relationships. We thank everyone who shared their thoughts and experiences with our readers, who undoubtedly gained insight about mentoring best practices as a result of the information provided in this column throughout the year.
Past issues of Diversity & the Bar®, including the full series of articles on mentoring published during 2005, are available online.
Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr. is currently the vice president of national sales at Areté Legal in San Francisco, Calif. He can be reached by email at ljohnson@aretelegal.com.
When seeking career advice, it is natural to reach out to people with whom you are most comfortable. However, operating within those limited confines may very well truncate the trajectory of your career.
That lesson is one of many that some of the most successful in-house attorneys have learned. Throughout 2005, this column has focused on Mentoring Across Differences, and how to build successful mentoring relationships among lawyers of different races, gender, and cultural backgrounds. Five extraordinary in-house lawyers have offered their views on mentoring for Diversity & the Bar® readers. This group has included one Hispanic American man who is a litigation specialist; one African American man who is a corporate securities specialist; an African American woman litigator; one Asian American woman whose expertise is intellectual property litigation; and one Asian American man, an intellectual property specialist.
As they have explained, some of their most helpful mentors came from completely different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And they have also shared other thoughts and insights about obtaining the most out of a mentoring relationship, including the following five keys to effective mentoring:
1) Informal Mentoring Relationships Can Be More Effective than Formal Ones
Isabella Fu, senior attorney at Microsoft Corporation, has found throughout her career that her informal mentors were far more helpful than the ones who had been formally assigned. For Fu, abstract discussions about career development with attorneys not even necessarily in her practice area were not nearly as useful as working with and studying the styles of attorneys she worked side-by-side with on projects.
"I never gained as much from my assigned mentors," she says. "I worked with many different attorneys and tried to learn from their styles, but not emulate any one person directly."
So although there is value to be derived from a formal mentoring relationship, it's important not to undervalue the importance of informal connections and the relationships that can be cultivated as a result.
2) Don't Underestimate the Power of Strategic Observation
J. P. Suarez, who was recently named senior vice president of loss prevention and risk control of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., says he owes much of his career success to the transparency of his mentors, including Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. When Suarez worked for Whitman in state government and at the federal level, she invited him to sit in on meetings and interact with her on a regular basis. "I think some of the best learning takes place by observing," says Suarez, who was previously vice president and general counsel for Wal-Mart Stores' SAM's Club Division before his promotion—proof that he knows how to take his own advice about furthering his career.
3) Technical Competence is Essential, But Political Acuity is Imperative
Technical ability alone is not enough to move you up in the ranks of an organization. A lawyer also has to act like a decent person and be able to blow his or her own horn without seeming arrogant. "Doing outstanding work should be a given," says Ivan K. Fong, chief legal officer of the Vendor Financial Services unit of GE Commercial Finance. "That's your entry ticket, and it's what people assume you are doing if you want to advance your career. But style matters, too, whether we acknowledge it or not."
4) Identify Different Categories of Mentors
Sandra Phillips, assistant general counsel and section chief for products litigation at Pfizer Inc., has identified five different mentoring roles that are all important. These include the technical advisor, who illustrates aspects of the job from research to presentation skills; the champion, who makes an effort to be your cheerleader and help you through the battlefield of internal office politics; the navigator or strategic advisor, who offers the big-picture advice for your entire career; the personal mentor, who is a friend who knows you perhaps better than you know yourself; and peer-to-peer mentors whom you meet in associations and organizations.
5) Reciprocal Mentoring Yields Perpetual Dividends
For James C. Johnson, vice president, corporate secretary, and assistant general counsel at The Boeing Company, lack of a mentor nearly killed his legal career. Johnson had been with the Securities and Exchange Commission for six years—where his career was going very well—when he jumped into private practice in 1983. He found that at the time, the private sector was unprepared to deal with black men, who were a rarity in this area of firm practice, and he was similarly ill-prepared to address the challenges that he faced as a "trailblazer." And, without a mentor, he stumbled at understanding—and didn't know how to learn—all the unwritten rules that govern life at a law firm. Thus, he watched his career shrivel until he made another, happier, career leap to a job as in-house counsel. At Northrop Grumman Corporation, Johnson gained as a mentor the general counsel, Dick Molleur. An older white man, Molleur took an interest in Johnson as a lawyer and a person, teaching him that the character, not the color, of the mentor is what matters most.
That painful lesson made Johnson especially aware of the importance of mentoring others and ensuring that no other young lawyers are left out in the cold. "It is critical for those of us who are lawyers and professionals of color to mentor and reach as far down the ladder as possible," he says. "If you look around the world at communities that work, you realize that it is because the elders have been successful at imparting their traditions, their wisdom, their know-how, and their knowledge to the next generations."
For any attorney taking on a new professional opportunity, moving to a new company is like moving into a new neighborhood. The new neighbors may not be the people you would normally reach out to, but they are the ones who best understand the community. And the sooner you reach out, the sooner they can help you.
With that thought, Diversity & the Bar® concludes what we hope has been a helpful series on the topic of mentoring.
From the November/December 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®