Senior Vice President, Human resources, DTE Energy
“You need people in your life who can help guide and show you the path and open your eyes to opportunities and situations that you may not have even begun to anticipate or know about.“
What are the qualities of a strong mentor?
I think the qualities are fundamentally about caring for others and looking externally to ensure that people are getting opportunities and guidance that perhaps you benefited from, I benefited from, in my life. And finding ways to repay that, to pay it forward. Nobody is born with the, clearly defined pathways and do “A” and then “B” will happen and then “C” will happen. You need people in your life who can help guide and show you the path and open your eyes to opportunities and situations that you may not have even begun to anticipate or know about. So I think a quality mentor is somebody who’s externally focused and giving back and paying it forward, however you want to say it, to make the lives of others easier in the way that they probably experienced through the course of their lives.
How does mentoring benefit the mentor? Spiritually, intellectually, socially, what do you feel it is?
It’s always funny because even in my answer to the first question it was caring for others and helping others to find their paths, benefiting from the knowledge and experience that you have and sharing that with others.
But it’s not just a one way, beneficial stream. Mentoring has two-way benefits, and learning from somebody, perhaps, who’s maybe less experienced or has a different background than you opens your eyes to things that perhaps were not as clear or as present to you. I’ve had countless dozens and dozens of mentees over the course of my career and life and just hearing about their perspectives of what they’re experiencing in the organization. That may have been completely unknown to me had I not been in this relationship of trust and sharing where the person is saying, “well, this is what I’m experiencing.” My effectiveness can improve in the role that I’m in through mentoring because we see things that we don’t get the opportunity to see ourselves.
Do you feel that mentorship should be a company requirement or a personal give-back?
I think it should be largely a personal give-back, supported by company systems and structures. The reason I say that is because if it’s a compliance thing, like, you must mentor at least one or
two folks, people can resort to checking the box and not engaging in a way that is authentic. And so I do believe that the best mentor-mentee relationships are ones where both are believing that this is something that’s helpful and beneficial and is supported again by encouragement, recognition within the company, tools and resources to ensure that the mentor-mentee relationship is producing the best possible outcomes.
In the 21st century, some think the paramount moral challenge is the struggle for fairness and gender equality. Why is gender equality even a challenge, especially in Western society today?
Why is it a challenge? Well, that’s, that’s the 64,000, or 64 million, or billion dollar question.
I think that, again, fundamentally, people are wired to prefer people like themselves. And if we look at our institutions, whether that be in business or government or even in philanthropy, these are fields where, historically, they’ve been supported and run by men.
If only one gender, predominantly, was in the leadership ranks of certain institutions and organizations, the natural byproduct of that is to continue to perpetuate it. It would be those same gender and leadership roles being brought into the organization. It’s human nature. And you need something to interrupt that. You need a higher level of thinking and awareness of the consequences of those types of decisions and the opportunity that gets left on the table from a talent perspective.
Was there ever a defining moment or experience in your life which led you to where you are today?
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reflection on my childhood experiences, my family dynamics, what I experienced and what those experiences may have or have not done to who I am today and, it’s not like I want to say it’s a very, very sad tale or anything, but when I think back on my childhood, I think there was a sense that I did not belong. Or maybe, at times, not even feeling worthy.
I came from a home where divorce was an ever-present backdrop, and eventually, there was a split. I came from a home where I had two siblings, an older brother and a younger brother. As the only girl, the middle child, I think there was a lot of early desire in me to be included and to want to bring harmony to this whole milieu that was happening around me.
And I think that’s carried me into my adult life. We do these kinds of diagnostic assessments to figure out where your strengths are, as an individual, what your tendencies are. And we do that as a means of understanding how we relate to one another for optimal organizational and team effectiveness. We do that at DTE Energy, I’m sure many, many, many other folks have. And the behaviors, the tendencies that I have that always bubbled to the top are empathy, Empathy, harmony, looking at people as individuals, and individualization. These tendencies… Where do they come from? And why am I passionate about this work? What fuels me inside? And I go back to, I think, a lot of those kinds of childhood experiences of wanting to bring people together and have people work effectively and constructively together. Kind of like bringing a little bit of peace and a sense that everybody can belong in this world.
There was a time in my career, and I’m being very transparent now, but there was a time in my career when I covered up these tendencies. I believed that what I needed to succeed was kind of this hard outer shell of strategic impermeability and drive, and so forth. And when I really reflect on what was driving my success then, it wasn’t those things because those were things that I was pretending to be. Instead, the behaviors that I kept leaning on were those tendencies to really recognize my own empathy and want to create team cohesion and better outcomes for people as a whole.
That’s really what was going on. But I had this outer shell that I felt I needed to demonstrate to the world to, you know, convey something.
Knowing that it is all about inclusivity, that can only happen by people sharing and opening up and seeing things that often people can’t see. It brings it nicely to the next question, which is, what do you think is the number one action as a society that we can take for women’s power and equality? What is it that women can do to help change this inequality that’s happening?
Well, I mean, we hear this often, and I see it in practice. Unfortunately, sometimes we see women who don’t lift up and support other women the way they could or should or, maybe even deep down, want to. But are somehow feeling like it’s a zero sum game: if I lift her up, then I don’t have that chance or that opportunity.
A view perhaps that we’re all in competition, to some degree, with each other. We talk about that often with our women at DTE Energy, we talk about it in our DEI space and, encourage and create awareness around saying ‘look we’re all here to lift one another up, and I don’t lose by doing that. We all win together.’ I think that one of the key things is not holding back on that because there’s some mistaken view that ‘I lose when you win.’
What do you feel was the best piece of advice you were ever given?
I think it really goes back probably almost 20 years and it was in the form of a Ted Talk that I watched. A group of us were talking about what we saw in this Ted Talk, and it was by Amy Cuddy. And Amy Cuddy, was a prominent researcher at Harvard. Her Ted Talk was all about authenticity and how being real is so important to living a full life and not covering up, and giving yourself permission to be who you are and valuing and honoring who you are. And so I have reflected on that many times over the 20 plus years since I first watched it. Loving yourself, being authentic is a key to opening up relationships and connections that just make life better.
Did you feel it came easy to you or was it a fight?
As I shared, I think I wore a mask for many years of my life, covering things that—
What was the breaking point? What was the point where you know this is what you were protecting, but didn’t know why you were protecting, and know ‘I’ve got to change if I am going to grow or make any impact?’
I don’t know if it was a single sort of event that would be really crystal clear in my head. I think it was just a constant… not constant, that would be the wrong word. A continual reinforcement and discussion around this particular topic. I mentioned the women of DTE, which is a very powerful, formidable group within our company, and bringing learning topics to one another where we can each kind of open our eyes to things that may have been holding us back and how we can be supportive for one another.
It was mentoring in the sense of not one-on-one, but a group of us working together for awareness of the things that we could be doing differently to improve effectiveness. This idea of leading with authenticity, showing vulnerability, they were new concepts to me. But as we began to unpack them as a team, as a group, and over time it all began to make sense.
As I began to do more of that, I was rewarded, not financially and not materially, but rewarded with deeper connections and a growing circle of people who wanted to help one another to be better. I think it was not a quick change. It was more of an evolution over time.
I think some of it comes with age, right? We’re just like okay, what am I doing? Life is short, I am going to show people that I didn’t always have it together. Maybe that’ll give them some freedom to explore what will make them stronger.
Who do you admire and why?
There’s a long, long list, but I would say I’m a big Oprah Winfrey fan. I am awestruck by her brilliance, by her compassion, by her generosity. I would love to sit down and talk with her. She is at the top of my list.
Tell me something that you’re reading, either right now or have read that you would recommend.
It’s one that I read a while ago, and it’s probably tied in a little bit to some of our conversation today, but it’s called The Origins of You, and it’s by Vienna Pharaon. It’s all about reflections on the early parts of your life, your family dynamics, and the experiences that created you uniquely.
I’ve spent time going back and thinking about things that made me who I am today, and, as I said, some of those—empathy, harmony, individualization—those themes are directly connected. I can see it so clearly now. I will also say, I recoiled a little bit against the thought of the book because I thought, ‘I don’t need to live in the past. I’m a forward oriented person,’ right? Like that’s my orientation 24/7: What’s happening tomorrow? Where am I headed? What’s my goals? But the book was just fascinating in terms of the connections between past, present, and future and nurturing those things that serve you really, really well and finding ways to break ties with things from your past that may not serve you well going forward.The Origins of You, pretty cool.