4 minutes
Credit-union-executive-turned-consultant Shari Storm, CCE, recommends cross-functional learning.
CEO of Category6 Consulting, author (Motherhood Is the New MBA), public speaker and recognized expert on business careers for women, Shari Storm, CCE, earned her spurs in the credit union world. She started as director of marketing at $528 million Verity Credit Union, Seattle, and ended up as a senior vice president there 16 years later. Along the way, she gave and received a lot of mentoring.
“Bill Hayes, [then] CEO at Verity, was a great mentor,” she says. “He gave me a lot of advice and opportunities to advance: tuition reimbursement while I went to graduate school, exposure to different activities of the credit union, a flexible schedule while I was writing my book. We never formalized it. We never had scheduled mentoring meetings. Mostly it was him letting me do things I wanted, but sometimes he directed me. He sent me to CUES’ CEO Institute, for example.”
Her advice is to avoid being pigeon-holed. “Don’t look to your immediate boss to be your mentor,” she recommends. If you’re a marketing specialist, the director of marketing is probably not your best mentor. Look for someone from another discipline. The organizational chart can be a trap, full of silos, she notes. Cross-functional activity can be liberating. “Mix up your mentoring as much as possible,” she advises.
Hayes helped her avoid the credit union siloes. “I was assigned to investment services, to branch sales, to IT. I got a broad range of experience and knowledge and didn’t get labeled.”
In her first year out of college, working in marketing, she asked a friend who also worked in marketing at an insurance company for career advice. “Learn accounting,” the friend told her. “A marketer needs to know numbers.” So, she took several accounting courses.
Being a mentor is not necessarily the same as being an advocate, Storm points out, and a talented up-and-comer needs both. Advice is useful, but you also want someone who can introduce the person they’re mentoring to the right people and open the right doors for them.
For Storm, mentoring has not been primarily about becoming someone’s protégé in a profound, enduring relationship. It’s been more occasional and opportunistic. “Potential mentors are everywhere,” she says. “Since college days, I’ve always sought out mentors. I find someone who knows things I’d like to know and say, ‘How about I take you out for coffee and ask you a few questions?’ They usually agree.”
“Potential mentors are everywhere. Since college days, I’ve always sought out mentors. I find someone who knows things I’d like to know and say, ‘How about I take you out for coffee and ask you a few questions?’ They usually agree.”
Shari Storm, CCE, CEO of Category6 Consulting, Edmonds, Wash.
One of her recent mentors was a 23-year-old man she met at a conference who brought up bitcoin in a conversation. “He had a young person’s perspective on technology and fintech that I could use,” she recalls, “so I asked him to … let me email him questions from time to time. He agreed.”
Through her consultancy, Storm is currently mentoring a department staffed with 20-somethings. “The technology around success is so overwhelming today I have to ask myself what I bring to the table, and it’s not necessarily technical knowledge. I can’t advise them about how to advertise on TV because it’s all streaming now. So I offer wisdom—how to tell what is and isn’t a crisis, how to filter demands on your time.”
While growth and learning are the key focus of mentoring, it doesn't hurt to touch on tactics for creating opportunities. “You never want to be in the ‘never leave’ category,” Storm advises. “Some games are worth playing. I know one woman who makes it a practice to apply for a new job every six months. You need to keep articulating your value as it grows,” she explains. “And you need practice so when the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity comes your way, you don’t fumble through the interviews as a novice. And you need to recommit, to test whether you’re still committed to your present position.”
There’s a special bond among women in the mentoring world, and organizations have evolved to give attention to helping women advance in business, encourage networking among women and plan women-only events that give them a safe place to vent, discuss problems and offer psychological support. But “avoid male-bashing,” Storm counsels. “That’s never productive. Some of my best advocates have been men.”
Mentoring relationships are not without challenges—for example, they are not immune to sexual tension. “That’s been an evergreen topic for 20 years,” Storm says. “When it happens to you, you’re likely to seek out a seasoned person of the same sex and talk about it and how you should handle it. It can get dicey.” But she doesn’t cover it in her speeches and she hasn’t seen it in the curricula of formal mentoring programs. “We should address it,” she observes.
Richard H. Gamble is a freelance writer based in Colorado.
