Providing Perspective
Once a month, Brenda Helps, 32, starts her workday by popping into Jim Mizes’ office at Jamba Juice headquarters in San Francisco--across town from her office at Nob Hill’s Fairmont Hotel.
For an hour or so, Helps--a mid-level manager in the hotel’s human resources department--chats with Mizes--vice president of operations for Jamba Juice--about problems she faces on the job and how to deal with them. Although they work in different industries, both say they have learned a great deal from these meetings.
“I listen a lot,” says Mizes, who has been at Jamba Juice for a year. “I provide perspective, ask her to consider and think about other alternatives when she tells me her strategy for dealing with a specific problem. Then she takes the ball and runs with it.”
“He gives me assignments,” Helps says, laughing. “Homework.”
Helps and Mizes are part of a program set up by Menttium, a Minneapolis-based firm that designs mentoring programs for companies. Their firms are participating in Menttium 100, a program that matches mid-level women managers with senior executives from outside their firms, in an effort to sidestep office politics and give young women advice, encouragement and critiques from managers with no personal stake in their performance.
“This person is not a sponsor, not someone who is running interference inside the company for the mentee,” says Gayle Holmes, founder of Menttium. “This person is a sounding board, somebody who will tell the truth. The mentee actually does the work.”
Helps started working with Mizes in April, and their relationship is supposed to last for a year. She says she quickly came to look forward to their meetings, which usually take place over muffins and coffee at a diner near his office.
“It is great to work with somebody outside of my industry who can give me a little bit of perspective on things,” Helps says. “He’ll challenge me. If I make a statement about something, he’ll play devil’s advocate and question me in a way that causes me to think about the situation and consider my approach.”
Mizes’ straightforward style is fine with her, Helps says.
“I didn’t want a mentor who was going to sugarcoat things. I wanted a mentor who was going to lay it on the line.”
Helps says she laid out her goals at the beginning of the process and determines the agenda of each of their meetings.
“I really just wanted to increase my effectiveness in communicating with all levels of my organization,” she says. “Jim is able to be helpful because he works with a large and diverse staff and is responsible for communicating with all different levels.”
Mizes, 42, says the relationship appeals to him because it is less charged than mentor-mentee relationships within a corporation.
“Within an organization--and I mentor some folks here--there’s the additional pressure of how well the mentee has done,” Mizes says. “Whatever politics could exist within an organization around the relationship doesn’t exist in this relationship. I feel like I can freely share my experiences with her.”
Mizes says Helps brings to him everything from daily, nitty-gritty managerial problems “to broad, philosophical issues.”
“There was a situation where I really needed to communicate with a colleague about a particular topic and I was having difficulty doing it,” recalls Helps, who has been on the job nine years. “Jim kind of brought me back to the basics of why I’m in the business. He asked me to examine my intent and suddenly, my path became clear. I was able to resolve that problem in a very positive way.”
The biggest benefit of the meetings for her, Helps says, is the chance “to bounce something off of him before I present it to my colleagues. He reacts the way somebody in my organization on his level would, so I get the benefit of testing the waters with him before I raise it within my own organization.”
