Genetic Bio / Real Chemestry
New York Moves: In your opinion, what qualities make a “Moves Mentor”?
Mary Stutts: This question is why I wrote my book, The Missing Mentor. In my focus on mentoring women, I realized that in the early days, when people used to ask me to mentor them, I would say “yes” to everyone. Eventually, that became too much, which is why I wrote the book — I’ll tell them what I’ll tell them if I have time to tell them. When I started mentoring, I would be out speaking and I would hear these women coming up to me and asking me questions about their career. What was so shocking to me was that I actually had the answer. I knew what to tell them. I started mentoring because I really wanted to give back and send the elevator back down to those who were looking to move up. What’s so important for folks to understand when you are the mentor, as well as the person being mentored, is that there needs to be a plan. You have to be intentional about it, because what I found is when I said “yes” to folks, they showed up in my office for me to mentor them and were like, “Ok, I’m here! Mentor me!”. They had no questions, no plan, and no real focus for the conversation. Both people need to have a specific focus.
That’s why my process starts with career development planning. I ask, “Where do you see yourself, and where do you want to be, in the next two years, three years, or five years?”. This is what I tell people to do to prepare for when they come to meet with me. Preparation is key for mentoring, because, as a mentor, I need to know who I’m about to talk to, what their aspirations are, where do they want to go, and what industry it’s in, so that I’m prepared and we can make the best use of our time. Some people say, “I don’t really know,” or “I don’t care what industry; I just want to be a director.” I’m prepared, though, so I know what this person needs to do and what experiences they need to have if they want to be at this level in their career.
Then, we can talk about experiences — both what experiences they need to have, and how we can help them get those experiences. I did some research early on, as I was working on my book, and I found a survey talking about the general managerial experiences that people need to have if they want to be promoted into leadership. There are experiences like job rotations, managing of profit and loss, doing a turnaround, and other things like that; but, what the research found is that the number one experience you need to have if you want to be promoted is mentoring. It also surfaced, as they were doing the survey, that men are getting more access to mentoring than women.
One of the things that I found as I was doing my research is that the number one reason that women weren’t getting access to these opportunities was because they didn’t ask. They were waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Tag, you’re it.” Sometimes that happens, but that doesn’t always happen. You have to ask for opportunities. What’s helped make this conversation easier for women is to have the understanding across corporations that, in order to retain their talent, they have to have career development pathways and plans.
When I mentor women, what they say is, “I want to talk about it, but my immediate supervisor is intimidated. They think I want their job.” The safe path, then, for people not wanting to raise waves, is to say, “I want to talk to you about my career development plan.” The good thing about that is that you can go have that conversation with your HR representative — you don’t even have to have that conversation with your boss. Every team leader knows that the career development pathway planning is critical to retaining staff, so that’s the new best way.
NYM: Should mentorship be a company requirement or a personal give-back?
MS: In companies that are the best places to work for diversity, for women, and just in general, career development planning is mandatory. If you are going to do career development planning, that means every single manager has to have a career development plan for their direct report employees. That’s the case at Genentech where I worked; that’s the case at Comcast, NBC Universal, and Kaiser Permanente. When it’s mandatory that you have to have those career development planning conversations with your employees, then the mentoring has to follow that, because that’s the only way you can really have the conversation. As opposed to making mentoring mandatory, it’s about having the career development planning conversations with your staff.
One of the things I like to emphasize is that there is no one, perfect mentor for anybody. Your mentoring network is going to change over the course of your career as you evolve and develop. You also want to make sure that you are valuing your mentor’s time. One of the questions that I ask when I’m speaking is, “How long do you think a mentoring session should ask? Is it an hour, 45 minutes, a half hour, or 15 minutes?”. The answer is 15 minutes. Be prepared to get in and out in 15 minutes, because then your mentor sees that this person values their time and that they are prepared. You are guaranteed, then, to get another 15 minutes. Whenever you come back to ask for more time, they’re going to give it to you, because you respect their time. The reason you find people not saying “yes” when someone asks them, “Will you be my mentor?” is because they don’t want to commit to an inordinate amount of time.. So, to say, “Will you take some time to review my career development plan with me?”, everybody is going to say “yes” to that. It doesn’t have to be your immediate supervisor; it can be more senior people in the organization.
As we’re doing the diversity and inclusion work, we need to have those one-on-one career development conversations with diverse members of their staff. They don’t necessarily have to happen just within their team, but within their organization, with women, and with people of color. We have to make time to do that.
NYM: Given the evidence that successful mentoring increases the bottom line, should any responsible five-year corporate strategy include a detailed plan and budget for mentoring?
MS: Absolutely. It is absolutely necessary for the company to be intentional about investing in their talent and their workforce. If you want them to invest their time and their life into building your business, then you have to invest in them. Even the smallest companies, I have found, will have budgets set aside for learning and development opportunities for their people. A lot of the companies now are using mentoring platforms like MentorcliQ and CSweetner. I’m a mentor on a platform where women can come in and actually join CSweetner and schedule a half-hour session with me. Companies are investing in those platforms so that their employees can get access to mentoring in their organization. Companies realize it, and the employees realize it — and they’re looking for it when they are coming to a company. Especially millennials and Gen Z, but even Gen X, are wanting to see if companies are making a learning and development investment in them. It’s actually being included in job descriptions even more as one of the perks or benefits of coming to work for that company.
NYM: “In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism…. in the 21st century, the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for fairness and gender equality around the world.” Why is gender equality even a challenge, especially in the ‘enlightened’ western world?
MS: The gender equality issue is the same reason that we have the racial equality issue, which is bias. Male-dominated society has had this historical setup and structure, certainly in the business and corporate worlds and careers. The challenges are still there when it comes to gender, and that’s why, as a part of the diversity and inclusion work that I do, I have a whole focus around gender-balanced leadership. The point is educating people in the organizations — both men and women — about the different kinds of characteristics of female-focused leadership versus male-focused leadership. With this education, there’s the understanding that you can be a woman and practice male-focused leadership and vice versa, but the point of it is that we need both. The companies that have, understand, and value gender-balanced leadership are doing better. They’re more financially lucrative and they’re better able to hold onto their employees and their workforce.
I don’t think anyone gets up every day and says, “I’m going to go out and create acts of bias, leave people out, or make microaggressions.” I don’t think it’s intentional, and I assume good intent; but, by the same token, corporations have to be intentional in making sure that they are practicing gender-balanced and ethnically-balanced leadership so that their companies are representative of the population of the countries, the cities, and the nations, where they exist and the customers and patients that they want. In America, our diversity is our competitive advantage. You want to take advantage of that from the perspective of selling your wares and growing your business, but do you think that you’re going to be able to do that without having a workforce that is representative of this country? It’s not possible for you to fully penetrate your market and fully achieve the value from your services and products that you could if you practice inclusive diversity, and that includes gender-balanced leadership.
Even in California, where we did legislation to mandate women on corporate boards of directors, what we found after the first couple of years, that only white women were being put on the board — even though the women who lobbied were women from every ethnicity across the board.We had to go back to the legislature to say, “Add people of color.” They did add people of color and LGBTQ people, but it’s unfortunate that you have to be so specific and direct when you’re trying to do these things. Hopefully we can move past that.
One of the ways that I like to address issues of racial and gender equality is to constantly reiterate to people, “One size fits one.” You cannot come in and say, “I’m going to treat everybody just like XYZ.” One size fits one. What is important to me is going to be totally different than what is important to you. How I want to be treated in the workplace, and what I consider to be important cultural humility is going to be different than what’s important to you. As leaders, we need to respect the individuality of our workforce and listen.
The reason I say “One size fits one” is because I have to encourage leaders — even physicians when they’re talking to patients — to listen to them. The biggest complaint that patients have about their physicians, especially women and diverse patients, is that the physician didn’t listen to them, and the result of that is worse health outcomes. For example, Black and Hispanic patients can be diagnosed later with cancer, because the physician didn’t listen early on and didn’t take them seriously when they were talking about the symptom. So, one size fits one. Listen to people and ask them questions about what’s important to them. Don’t assume you know, just because you see it’s a woman, or just because you see it’s a Black person, Hispanic person, or Asian person, or an LGBTQ person.
NYM: Was there a defining moment or experience in your life that led you to where you are today? What was it?
MS: I think the defining moment for me happened when I was in a leadership development class at Stanford that my company paid for me to go to back when I was at Kaiser Permanente. It was a 3-day leadership program that was run by this amazing man, who said something to challenge us, and I’ve never forgotten it. I also talk to women quite a bit about it when I’m speaking. He said, “What would you do if you had no fear?”. That question was such an epiphany moment for me, because I did not realize how much fear was holding me back.
Carla Harris talks about the fact that we don’t like negotiating for money, or raises, or promotions, and a lot of that is fear-based. You just figure that you should come in, put your head down, do a good job, and somebody’s going to recognize you and tap you on the shoulder. I had to understand and unpeel that in my mind so that I not only started searching inside myself to see what I really wanted out of life, but also paying more attention, externally, to the opportunities available to me.
This was a changing moment for me. I started doing pilots and recommending them, and my leaders let me do it at Kaiser, Bayer, and Genentech. As a result of that, I ended up leading some really trailblazing, wonderful, and innovative opportunities that added value to my companies. I’m an avid reader, so I was always staying on top of the trends and the latest data to assess where the greatest need was. When I paid attention to what was going on in my company, I saw places where we could make an impact.
Ten years ago, before diversity in clinical trials became a thing like it is now at Genentech, I realized, “You know what? We did not have any diverse people in our asthma trial.” The FDA called us out on it at the outcome hearing. We had 50 positive phase 3 trials in a row, and we were leading the industry in successful clinical trials, so we knew how to do this right. Who better than us to take on this corporate social responsibility? Before the “What would you do if you had no fear?” question, I would have never even been thinking about this. I wouldn’t have even had the mindset to say, “I can do this.” Asking myself that question, and really thinking about it, gave me the mindset to say, “If there’s something that I see needs to be done, I can do it. Or, I can certainly speak up about it, help gather people, convene people, and put together a team to address it.”
This idea sets the tone for women everywhere. This is the part where the mentoring comes in. I mentor women around the idea of “What would you do if you had no fear?” to help them see themselves in a greater role. They can stretch themselves, go ask for what they want, and envision what they really want to do. It’s a pivotal moment for women everywhere to not only hear it, but to grab ahold of it. We’re always looking out for and helping everybody else, but, a lot of times, we don’t help ourselves. We don’t speak up for ourselves because we want to make sure that everybody else gets the attention, help, advancement, or promotion. It’s so important for us to go beyond just helping and nurturing everybody else because, sometimes, we are the ones who need to be in those higher positions. We have the knowledge, we know what to do, and we are going to treat folks equitably and make sure that we’re inclusive — in our hiring process, our teams, our businesses, and our jobs. We’ve got to do this.
Something I found out over the course of working with women and people of color over the years at my different companies is that people want access and recognition. The access piece is huge because we need to talk to leaders. They need to be the ones doing these fireside chats. You can;t do one-on-one with everybody, but when you have those affinity groups, you can have that contact and interaction. People need to know how they got where they are, what decisions they made, what were their pivotal moments, and the circumstances they grew up in. People want to understand the vision, thinking, and mind behind these leaders.
NYM: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
MS: The best piece of advice I was given was by a woman who’s a CEO now. She said, “Ask for what you want when it comes to funding for your ideas and your initiatives or projects. If they don’t turn blue when you give them your number, you haven’t asked for enough.” You’ve got to have enough funding, and not start so low. Ask for what you really think is needed to get this done, instead of worrying about what they might say or if they might be shocked.
NYM: What would you say to yourself at 15 years old?
MS: The biggest thing that I would tell my 15-year-old self is to always go for it. Whatever it is you want, or that you’re dreaming about and thinking about, just go for it. Nothing ventured; nothing gained. That’s something I also advise a lot of people about: go for it. For me, that was getting a college degree after growing up in the rural south and wanting to get into a college that had only recently started accepting Black students. A lot of people are afraid to do that, but go for it. Go graduate school. Move to California. I applied to my first global role when I had no global experience, but I just went for it. Even if you don’t get it, you will learn just from the experience of going for it. All of it’s a part of development.
NYM: Who do you most admire? Why?
MS: The person I admire the most, is my foster mom. I became a foster child at the age of five years old, and my foster mother was so inspirational because she was the first person in her family to go to college. She went to Grambling State University, and she was a fifth grade school teacher, but she also was the first certified special education teacher in the state of Louisiana. She believed that every child could learn. She was their teacher before they created the special education curriculum. She was the teacher where they put all the “problem” children — primarily Black boys — in her class. She would be so happy to have those boys in her class, and she would be bragging at the dinner table about how well they were doing. She would say, “There’s nothing wrong with those children. They just need someone to expect more of them.”
She believed that every child could learn, and in Dr. Mary Louise Wilson’s classroom, every child did. So, imagine how she nurtured me, helped me, and always expected the best of me. If I got a B on my report card, she would say, “A B is good, but you’re an A student.” Imagine hearing that your whole life: “You’re an A student.” Because of that, I never had a lot of the insecurities that I probably would have had being a foster child. People are shocked when they find out that I was a foster child. It was a very nurturing, loving family. She set this bar, not in a punitive way, but she would just say, “Get together your own head, and know you can do this. You are an A student.” Because she said it, I expected to be an A student and to get an A all the time. That became my goal, and for the most part, I did.
She’s deceased now, but every door that I’ve gone through, she has been 100% behind me. She’d say, “Yeah, you can do this! You’re brilliant!”. When I started my career producing TV shows, she loved it. She would always have me giving speeches and doing talks. My foster father was a Baptist minister, and on Easter, I’d say poems and read papers. She put me on platforms as a child from the time I was five years old, and it was all preparing me for what I’m doing now. Even as I got into this role as the CEO of the HBA, and even this work that I did at Real Chemistry of convening all of these dialogues about advancing health equity and inclusion, she really prepared me for all of that. She saw that in me, early on, when I didn’t have a clue.
