Sandra Phillips: The Five Dimensions of Mentoring
Sandra Phillips, assistant general counsel and section chief for products litigation at Pfizer Inc, shared her thoughts with Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr., the founder of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, and publisher emeritus of Diversity & the Bar® magazine. This is the fourth of six articles 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.
Growing up in Texas, Sandra Phillips' grandfather always told her she could be anything she wanted to be in life. And the message stuck: Phillips went on to earn her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, rise through the ranks of the private legal world, and become managing partner at the Houston office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP. Last year, she left the Lone Star state for the Big Apple, where she now works as assistant general counsel and section chief for products litigation at Pfizer Inc. Highly active and involved in her community, Phillips spoke with Johnson about her experience and philosophy of mentoring and how it has shaped her career.
"Mentoring has had a tremendous impact on my career," says Sandra Phillips. "Every position I've had over the past 15 or 16 years has been linked in some way to someone who has mentored me in one way or another, and pointed me in the direction of a position that they thought would be a good stepping stone or otherwise fulfilling from a professional standpoint." The way Phillips sees it, behind every successful individual is a mentor-or really, a team of mentors that she playfully dubs a "board of governors"-who has helped him/her along the way. And the sooner one starts assembling this group, and is aware of its necessity, the better.
"Coming into a new workplace, one can often go one of two ways. There is the person who comes in all brash and arrogant, thinking that they know it all, and on the opposite end of the spectrum is the person who comes in so timid that they make people feel like they don't know what they are doing." According to Phillips, either one of these attitudes can be self-destructive, especially for women and minorities.
To illustrate the point, Phillips enjoys telling the story of the first mentor to take an active interest in her career, John Bailey, who hired her when he was head of litigation at Chevron.
"My mentoring relationship with John Bailey was one of the most important I've ever had," Phillips recalls, explaining that on the surface, the two couldn't have been more different. Bailey was a tall, thin, white patrician southerner at the top of his career; Phillips was a young and ambitious African American woman whose law school diploma still bore damp ink. Yet, as Phillips soon found out, appearances can be deceiving: "I was aware of the differences between us across all demographic lines, yet he took me under his wing and told me to dream big." This was a crucial lesson for Phillips; not only did Bailey not try to mold his young protégé in his image, but he also behaved in a way that allowed her to let her guard down, so that she could be herself and let her own talents shine through.
These mentors can take any number of roles, and are critical in competitive arenas like corporations and top-flight law firms, where technical excellence and proficiency is only enough to get someone in the door-a situation that Phillips says often sets a self-defeating trap for minorities and women.
Phillips tells the story of another of her mentors, Carla Herron, associate general counsel, group counsel litigation at Shell Oil Company in Houston, who "almost better than anyone else helped me learn to see what was coming around the next corner."
Up until that time, recalls Phillips, she had been largely concerned with "getting the t's crossed and the i's dotted, and just generally being perceived as a very technically competent person." Heron taught her that in addition to being technically competent, she would have to "understand how the dynamics of the workplace changed as I advanced" in order to be truly successful. She also taught Phillips the mechanics of working effectively in a private law firm, which is an entirely new set of skills altogether, and opened her up to the notion that one has to maintain multiple tracks toward success.
"Many lawyers of color come into law firms thinking that we need to prove our competence, because we fear that other folks won't think that we are [capable] because of stereotypes," she says. What minorities and women in such situations sometimes don't realize is that they are already in the door because they are competent. To truly succeed takes a higher level of strategic thinking of the sort that Herron taught Phillips.
But Herron's was just one kind of mentoring; Phillips believes that mentoring can take place in five different dimensions, with individual mentors fulfilling one or several roles all at the same time. These different facets of mentoring include the technical advisor (the person who helps you with the technical aspects of a job, from research and writing to presentation skills); the champion, who makes it his or her business to sing your praises to others and help you navigate the maze of your organization's internal politics; the navigator or strategic advisor, often someone outside your organization, who will help advise you over the course of your career; the personal mentor, who is a friend who knows you perhaps even better than you know yourself and can provide a perspective no one else can; and the en masse or peer-to-peer mentors whom one encounters in groups such as MCCA® and the DuPont Minority Lawyers Network, two groups in which Phillips has been active and cultivated key relationships.
There can be an overlap in the various roles that different mentors fulfill-"sometimes the champion is also your roadmap," says Phillips, adding that "Carla Herron has been just about every sort of mentor and friend possible"-but the common thread is that they are all stakeholders in an individual's career. That is to say, they are personally invested in their mentee's success.
But ultimately, says Phillips, the key to leveraging mentoring relationships for career success is to keep many different people in your corner at the same time, and not get bogged down in the basics of proving technical competence.
"If you're not running at least a parallel and a triple track to your career, you won't have sponsors and champions, and then you risk doing things that will derail your career that have nothing to do with your bona fides," advises Phillips. "People of color often tend to rely on one track, because they feel that if they can make that one track work, everything will work out. But all too often, that's a way to wind up falling behind and in a position where, if not impossible, it can still be very tough to catch up."
Ultimately, Phillips counts her involvement with women and minority attorney organizations as a key to her professional development. "Actively participating in these organizations provides you an opportunity to find mentors, gain useful professional development tips, build confidence by providing speaking opportunities, and, most importantly, develop a network of friends who can support you through the rough spots."
 | 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. |
From the July/August 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®